
polity
Copyright © Nick
Couldry and Andreas Hepp 2017
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Couldry and Andreas Hepp to be identified as Authors of this Work has been
asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
© Cover picture
by Beate Koehler, http://beate-koehler.name
First published
in 2017 by Polity Press
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ISBN-13:
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Couldry, Nick, author. I Hepp, Andreas, author.
Title: The mediated construction of reality: society, culture, mediatization /
Nick Couldry, Andreas Hepp.
Description: Cambridge, UK; Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2016. I Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016011836 (print) I LCCN 2016019395 (ebook) I ISBN
9780745681306 (hardback) I ISBN 9780745681313 (pbk.) I ISBN 9780745686523
(Mobi) I ISBN 9780745686530 (Epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Mass media--Social aspects. Mass media and culture.
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This book brings
to a temporary resting point more than ten years of shared discussion and
enquiry.
When we met and
discovered each other’s work in 2003, we also quickly realized that we had a
shared interest in social theory, and a dissatisfaction with the limited
dialogue existing between social theory and media theory in the UK, Germany and
elsewhere. For a decade we have been organizing and writing together, with
various interruptions; but only in mid 2012, during a Visiting Fellowship by
Andreas in the Department at Goldsmiths, University of London, did we conceive
the idea of something more ambitious: a jointly written book, where we would
try to answer that dissatisfaction by setting out the social theory we saw as
necessary for an age of digital media. We were inspired in part by the
tradition of social phenomenology, but by many other sources besides, and
provoked by the clear inadequacy of the treatment of media and communications
in a famous offshoot of that tradition, Berger and Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality, which marks the
half-century of its publication this year. A particular inspiration for us both
had been listening to a keynote talk by Hubert Knoblauch at the Mediatized
World Conference at the University of Bremen in April 2011, which suggested a
more satisfying way of reconnecting the UK and German traditions of social
theory than had been found before. After Nick moved back to the London School
of Economics in September 2013, it was fortunately possible for Andreas to
return to London during 2015 and 2016 as a Visiting Senior Fellow in LSE’s
Department of Media and Communications, in order to help focus on an intense
phase of the book’s writing. We thank both the LSE and Goldsmiths departments for
their support for these two fellowships, the University of Bremen and,
especially, Andreas’ colleagues at the ZeMKI for making possible two longer
stays abroad in such a short time.
A word on how the
book was written: while a first rough draft of a chapter was written by one of
us, we discussed and reworked such drafts intensively, contributing on such a
basis further parts to the chapters, which were discussed and reworked again. By that
method we hope to have developed a consistent analytical approach across the
whole book. As writers, we have been shaped by different intellectual
traditions that have distinctive writing styles: we have debated each turn of
the argument along the way, and hope to have integrated the best of each
tradition. We are happy for our distinctive voices to be discernible in each
chapter, and hope as a reader you will be too.
During this
book’s researching and writing, we each had to contend with many other
responsibilities. We must single out for thanks a number of people without whom
this book could not have been written on this time-scale. Most notable is
Anthony Kelly, Nick’s research assistant from November 2013 to October 2015,
who did vital work on the literature searches underlying Chapters 5, 6 and 8, and who provided much support on other related
topics and projects during this time. We are also very grateful to Miriam
Rahali, who took over as Nick’s research assistant during November 2015,
providing invaluable help in pulling together the book’s references, and also
reading the manuscript just before final submission. Nick also wants to thank
for her support Natalie Fenton, who was joint Head of Department with Nick at
Goldsmiths during the first year of preparing the book’s ideas. Our work for Chapters 2, 3 and 4 was very much supported by literature searches
conducted by Ulrike Gerhard, student research assistant at the University of
Bremen. Later in this role, Anna Heinemann and Linda Siegel undertook many
final checks of references. Organizationally, all our work was supported by
Heide Pawlik and Leif Kramp at the ZeMKI, University of Bremen.
We are grateful
to various institutions for giving us the opportunity to present ideas from the
book: the Time, Memory and Representation Group, Södertörn University, Stockholm,
March 2014 (thanks to Hans Ruin and Staffan Ericsson); the Institute for
Advanced Studies, Helsinki (thanks to Johanna Sumiala); the Perspectives of
Communicative Constructivism Conference, Berlin, November 2014 (thanks to
Hubert Knoblauch and Jo Reichertz); the Media and Social Theory Research
Network, LSE, which we launched with a joint talk in May 2015; the Reflexive
Mediatization Workshop, the Technical University Dortmund, April 2015 (thanks
to Ronald Hitzler and Michaela Pfadenhauer); the Meaning Across Media
Conference, Copenhagen University, May 2015 (thanks to Kjetil Sandvik); the
Social Ontology of Digital Data and Digital Technology Symposium, by the
Warwick University Centre for Social Ontology, London, July 2015 (thanks to
Mark Carrigan); the ECREA Doctoral Summer School, Bremen University, August
2015; the New Directions in Mediatization Research Workshop, Copenhagen, October 2015
(thanks to Stig Hjarvard); and the Media Communications between Complexity and
Simplification Conference at the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet
and Society, Berlin, November 2015.
We are grateful
to a number of people for helpful discussions and inspiration along the way:
Mark Andrejevic, Veronica Barassi, Andreas Breiter, Kenzie Burchell, Craig
Calhoun, Tarleton Gillespie, Anthony Giddens, Uwe Hasebrink, Daniel Knapp,
Hubert Knoblauch, Friedrich Krotz, Risto Kunelius, Jannis Kallinikos, Knut
Lundby, Peter Lunt, Sonia Livingstone, Gina Neff, Thomas Poell, Alison Powell,
Jo Reichertz, Michaela Pfadenhauer, Uwe Schimank, Kim Schrøder, Justus
Uitermark, Jose van Dijck. In addition, Andreas’ work on the book benefited
greatly from the discussions in the research network ‘Communicative
Figurations’, funded by the German Initiative of Excellence as one of the
University of Bremen’s Creative Units, and he would like to thank all its
members for the stimulating collaboration. Thanks also to the anonymous readers
of our manuscript for encouraging us to clarify various aspects of the book’s
argument, to Susan Beer, our copy-editor, and to Miriam Rahali, whose
proof-reading skills saved us from many errors.
Nick would like
to dedicate this book to the memory of John Edwards, much loved father-in-law
(). Andreas would like to dedicate this book to Beate Köhler.
We are deeply
grateful to our partners, Louise Edwards and Beate Köhler, for their love,
patience and support during our many absences. A special thank you to Beate for
supporting us with the cover picture of the book – and her willingness to stay
at various times in London.
Nick Couldry and
Andreas Hepp
London and Bremen, February 2016
Suppose the
social to be mediated – what? This question (with apologies to Nietzsche)1 has hovered over
social theory, and everyday accounts of the social and public world, since the
late nineteenth century. When not ignored, the question has received myths or
slogans for answers: the few serious answers have tended to be based on a
reading of social infrastructures at least a quarter of a century old. This is
a book of social theory that tries to do better than that.
So, how do we
rethink the character of the social world (including ‘sociality’,
‘socialization’, ‘social order’, ‘society’), starting out from the principle
that the social is constructed from, and through, technologically mediated
processes and infrastructures of communication, that is, through what we have
come to call ‘media’? Since our ‘reality’ as human beings who must live together
is constructed through social processes, what are the consequences for that
reality if the social itself is already ‘mediated’;
that is, shaped and formed through media? These questions generate our book’s
title: the mediated construction of reality.
The basic terms
of these questions need some discussion. ‘The social’? This
term has been attacked in recent decades from many directions. Quite apart from
neoliberal attacks on the ‘social’ – Margaret Thatcher’s notorious slogan
‘there is no such thing as society’ – the importance of the social as an object
of theoretical enquiry has increasingly been displaced by
other priorities in the social sciences. So, for example, the philosopher and
sociologist of science, Bruno Latour, has sought to deconstruct, or at least
reassemble, ‘the social’ as a sociologist’s fiction, that generally obscures
from us the actual material arrangements by which various entities, human and
non-human, are connected for various purposes and on various scales.2 Latour’s key target
was the sociology of Emile Durkheim. Durkheim3
argued in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that society is a
fact constructed out of the acts and imaginings of human beings; a ‘fact’ just
as much as the ‘facts’ of natural science. Durkheim’s reference point for this
notion of society was primarily the emotional and cognitive reality of the face-to-face gathering.
Durkheim did not live to consider how the notion of society must change when it
is presented to us, in part, through technological processes of mediation that,
in turn, are necessarily outcomes of economic and political forces: clearly
this is an omission that needs correction. In addition, other writers have seen
a problem in Durkheim’s emphasis on the work that representations of
the social do in reproducing its reality, looking elsewhere for forms of
connection, friction and resonance that bypass ‘meaning’ altogether (). Still others want to shift our focus away from human interactions to the
‘posthuman’ from which perspective ‘the social’ can seem quaintly parochial
(). At the very least, the term ‘social’ needs some repair work –
if, that is, the project of social theory is to be renewed.
What of ‘media’? Serious reflection on how media institutions
represent – perhaps distort – the social already requires us to put certain
versions of ‘the social’ or ‘society’ within scare quotes. The problem
multiplies in the digital era when the most promising source of new economic
value appears to be what are called ‘social media’
platforms. The very term ‘media’ masks huge changes. In the mid to late
twentieth century, debate about media’s implications for the values and
realities on which social life was based focused on television and film,4 that is, the
consequences of particular news frames or exemplary images. Only radio in the age of mass media
plausibly involved a continuous form of social shaping,
although Tarde’s () suggestive work on the continuous influence of how news
circulates through newspapers already pointed in this direction.5 But the expansion of
internet access via the World Wide Web from the 1990s and its move to smart
mobile devices from the 2000s profoundly changed the questions that social
theory needed to answer about media and media theory about the social.
Particularly with the introduction of social media networks from the mid 2000s,
‘media’ now are much more than specific channels of centralized content: they
comprise platforms which, for many humans, literally are
the spaces where, through communication, they enact the social. If
the basic building-blocks of social life are potentially themselves now shaped
by ‘media’ – that is, the contents and infrastructure derived from
institutionally sustained technologies of communication – then social theory
must rethink the implications of ‘media’ for its basic term,
‘the social’. ‘The digital revolution’ as it is often called – but it involves
much more than digitalization and the internet – must, as Anthony Giddens
() has argued, be answered by a major transformation in sociological
thinking too. That transformation in sociological thought and its reorientation
towards these key changes in media and social
infrastructures is the principal focus of this book.
For that reason – that is, our double focus on the
mutual transformations of media and the social world
together – we will give less emphasis to specific media texts, representations
and imaginative forms than we might do in a book focused exclusively on media
themselves. For the same reason, when we discuss ‘reality’ in this book, we
refer not to specific media representations or enactments of reality (for
example ‘reality TV’), but to the achieved sense of a social world to which
media practices, on the largest scale, contribute. In this, starting out from
the detailed scholarship of media and communications studies, we hope to make a
substantive contribution both to media and social theory.
Indeed our point is that social theory is no longer viable, unless it has been,
in part, transformed by media theory.
Yet, once we have
acknowledged the complexity of the institutional ‘figurations’ we now call
‘media’ (we will come back to the term ‘figurations’) and deconstructed the
various representations of the social that different power blocs make, some
might be tempted to abandon the term ‘social’ entirely. But that would be a
huge mistake. For the term ‘social’ is one we cannot do without if we are to
grasp the complexities that interest us. The term ‘social’ points to a basic
feature of human life: what historian and social theorist William Sewell calls
‘the various mediations that place people into “social” relations with one
another’.6 Indeed the word
‘social’ signifies something fundamental that even recent detractors of the
social would not deny: the basis of our human life-in-common in relations of
interdependence. These always include relations of communication: as
Axel Honneth says, ‘the process of social construction can [. . .] only be
analysed as a communicative process’ (). The fundamentally mediated nature of the social – our necessarily
mediated interdependence as human beings – is therefore based not in some
internal mental reality, but rather on the material processes
(objects, linkages, infrastructures, platforms) through which communication,
and the construction of meaning, take place. Those material processes of
mediation constitute much of the stuff of the social.
As a result, Sewell argues, the social is always double in character: both form
of meaning and built environment.7
Yet this inherent complexity of the social is lost if we abandon the term
‘social’ and go off to analyse either meanings or technologies of connection in
isolation. Meanwhile, the infrastructures of the ‘media’ that help constitute
the social get ever more complex.
Our argument
involves new conceptual and historical work. For example, in Part I of this book, we introduce
the reading of communications history on which our conceptual framework is
based, and adapt the term ‘mediatization’ as shorthand for all the transformations of communicative and social processes, and
the social and practical forms built from them, which follow from our
increasing reliance on technologically and institutionally based processes of
mediation. Quite clearly such transformations are complex, meaning that
‘mediatization’ is not just one type of thing, one ‘logic’ of doing things;
indeed it is best understood as not a ‘thing’ or ‘logic’ at all, but as the
variety of ways in which possible orderings
of the social by media are further transformed and stabilized through
continuous feedback loops.
Particularly
important as a mid-range concept for grasping those more complex transformations
is the term ‘figuration’, which we borrow from the late work of Norbert Elias
in the 1970s and 1980s. We find it encouraging for the long-term project of
social theory that concepts developed decades ago have their full analytical
power only today. Now we can appreciate their openness to processes that, on a
larger scale, are gaining in importance today, when the ‘stuff’ of the social
is being transformed by data-based processes, largely automated and on vast
scales, something that could not possibly have been anticipated when those
concepts were developed. Much about today’s infrastructures of social
interaction seems alien to most earlier versions of social theory, as discussed
further later in our argument. Yet this growing interdependence of sociality on system – the growing ‘institutionalization’ of both
self and collectivity (as reflected in the book’s third part) – is at root
hardly contrary to the vision of social life that Georg Simmel had, already, at
the dawn of the modern media age. In a chapter on ‘sociability’ Simmel offered
an insight into the paradoxical – certainly complex and recursive – nature of
mediated social life:
the world of sociability [. . .] is an artificial world [. . .]. If now we have the conception that we enter into sociability purely as “human beings”, as that which we really are [. . .] it is because modern life is overburdened with objective content and material demands. ()
This captures
well the tension between our ever-changing sense of who ‘we’ are (and what our
lives together mean) and the material demands of our technologically supported
lives in view of, and in touch with, each other. The more intense our social
life feels, the greater its recursive dependence on technological media of
communication. We must sharpen our grasp of this paradox, and that is the
purpose of this book.
We want in this
book to understand better the construction of everyday reality as part of the
social world. We agree with philosopher of science Ian Hacking when he writes
() that the concept of ‘construction has become stale. It needs to
be freshened up’. A theory of the construction of social reality must
at the very least pay attention to a key element in the construction of social
life today, which is mediated communications. This simple recognition turns out
to have profound consequences for social theory.
Our goal is to
develop a materialist phenomenology of the types of social
world in which media play an obvious and unavoidable part. Let us unpack this a
little more. The word materialist refers back to an
approach called ‘cultural materialism’, linked closely with the writing of
Raymond Williams (). Williams’ main point was to include the material as well as the symbolic aspects of
everyday practices when analysing culture as a ‘whole way of life’. Williams
() himself demonstrated the importance of this point of departure when he
discussed television as both (material) technology and (symbolic) cultural
form. It is not a matter of positioning the material against the symbolic, but
of grasping both in their interrelatedness, as part of a proper analysis of how
media and communications contribute to the construction of the social world. We
need, in other words, to consider media both as technologies including
infrastructures and as processes of sense-making,
if we want to understand how today’s social worlds come into being. By using
the term ‘materiality’ we want to emphasize this full complexity.
We offer a phenomenology of the social world, because we believe
that, whatever its appearance of complexity, even of opacity, the social world
remains something accessible to interpretation and understanding by human
actors, indeed a structure built up, in part, through those
interpretations and understandings. Weber’s definition of sociology as ‘the interpretative understanding of social action’ () has much more than definitional force, since social life, as Paul
Ricoeur () wrote, has its ‘very foundation’ in ‘substituting signs
for things’: that is, signs that embody interpretations. Phenomenology,
however, goes further in taking seriously the world as it appears for
interpretation to particular situated social
actors, from their point of view within wider relations of
interdependence. There is an implicitly humanist dimension to phenomenology by
which we fully stand.8
We do not claim however to have done detailed phenomenological empirical work
behind every claim in our book: not only would that have been impossible, given the
range it tries to cover, but it would ignore the excellent literature on how a
mediated social world appears to social actors that already exists. Our account
throughout however, even where based on secondary literature, is developed from
the standpoint of a possible phenomenology that is
oriented to empirical research.
A fully materialist phenomenology is able to bypass some
standard and important objections to what has been associated with the
‘classic’ tradition of social phenomenology. Take, for example, Michel
Foucault’s firm rejection of phenomenology for giving ‘absolute priority to the
observing subject’ (), or Pierre Bourdieu’s related
objection to symbolic interactionism for ‘reducing relations of power to
relations of communication’ (). With our materialist
phenomenology we hope to commit neither of these sins. If the social world is
built up, in part, of interpretations and communications, as phenomenology
insists, our account of that world must look closely at the material
infrastructures through which, and on the basis of which,
communications today take place. Phenomenology cannot then only focus on how the world appears for interpretation
by particular social actors.9
What is needed instead is a full-blown rethinking of the social construction of
everyday reality, in all its interconnectedness, for the digital age. That
means reoccupying the space associated with Berger and Luckmann’s well-known
book, The Social Construction of Reality, published exactly
half a century ago and one of the most read sociology texts of the 1960s and
1970s. But our aim is emphatically not to rework Berger
and Luckmann’s book, or even to reinterpret it. Our aim instead, starting out
from something like their basic ambition, is to build a different but
comparable account of how social reality is constructed, an account that is
adequate to the communicative forms of the digital age.
There is
incidentally still much to admire about Berger and Luckmann’s book, developing
as it did the mid twentieth-century’s tradition of phenomenological sociology
into a satisfying version of the sociology of knowledge. Yet this book seems
very distant from us now. A basic reason is that Berger and Luckmann say almost
nothing about technologically based media of communication. Take for example
this rare passage where media are mentioned obliquely in a discussion of the
lifeworld’s dialectic of near and far:
The reality of everyday life is organized around the ‘here’ of my body and the ‘now’ of my present [. . .] Typically my interest in the far zones is less intense and certainly less urgent. I am intensely interested in the cluster of objects involved in my daily occupation [. . .] I may also be interested in what goes on at Cape Kennedy or in outer space, but this interest is a matter of private, ‘leisure-time’ choice rather than an urgent matter of my everyday life. ()
Media feature in
passing here, but only as the window onto a distant world of fascination that
helps us while away our leisure hours. Berger and Luckmann do not even consider
the importance of media-based narratives for shaping our sense of everyday reality.
Was this plausible even in the 1960s? Probably not, and it had long since
ceased to be plausible by the 1990s when we both became researchers, after
which the embedding of media in the fabric of daily life has intensified
considerably. Not surprisingly, therefore, Berger and Luckmann’s work has not
had much influence on the international cross-disciplinary field of media and
communications research.10
Our challenge is
in any case quite different from Berger and Luckmann’s: it is to build a fully
materialist phenomenology that starts out from the fact not just of digital
media but also of the new data-driven infrastructures and communications on
which today’s social interfaces increasingly rely. It means understanding how
the social is constructed in an age of deep mediatization
when the very elements and building-blocks from which a sense of the
social is constructed become themselves based in
technologically based processes of mediation. As a result, the ways in which we
make sense of the world phenomenologically become necessarily entangled with
the constraints, affordances and power-relations that are features of media as
infrastructures for communication. We explore the concept of ‘deep’
mediatization further in Chapter 3, but we
signal now that it involves a fundamental transformation in how the social
world is constructed, and so can be described. Offering such an account will
involve returning as much to Berger and Luckmann’s predecessor, Alfred Schutz,
who had insights already into the consequences of media technologies for social
reality that Berger and Luckmann failed to develop.
Our reworking of
Berger and Luckmann’s legacy has consequences for this book’s position in the
history of sociology. Step by step we extend the scope of Berger and Luckmann’s
original project – ‘The social construction of reality’ – to acknowledge the
fully mediated character of today’s everyday reality. And while Berger and
Luckmann originally sketched a ‘sociology of knowledge’ itself (as they
subtitled their book), we develop instead a sociological account of how media
and communications are embedded in everyday life, as the basis for a new
account of how the social world and social reality are constructed in an age whose
communications infrastructure is radically different from what Berger and
Luckmann knew11
This is the reason why we called this book ‘The mediated
construction of reality’. In that sense, this book can also be read as a
contribution to the sociology of knowledge, although our argument at no point
depends on making that claim.
Before we get
started on our analysis, we would like to explain some wider sources that have
inspired this project, and note some others that we have tended to avoid.
A surprising
source of inspiration for our reinterpretation of Berger and Luckmann comes from
the great Jesuit priest and radical educator, Ivan Illich. The last book he
wrote before he died offered a reinterpretation of the shift in the
communicative lifeworld during Europe’s twelfth century that preceded the more celebrated transformations that
flowed from printing technology. Illich describes the shift from a world where
written manuscripts served as the inert repository where revered texts in
sacred languages were stored for eternity – while being kept alive through oral
recitation, often from memory () – to a world where
writing itself became the site where new meanings were
made. Writing became used for storage, but also for contemporary expression,
and in any language, including meanings intended by the
‘ordinary’ literate person (for example, a note-taker or diary-writer). Illich
describes a complete reorientation of how humans make meaning through
technologies of storage: this shift took place over half a century, and
introduced a new type of reading, writing, speaking and thinking self. Illich
characterized the change involved as a change in ‘the relations between the axioms of conceptual space and social reality
insofar as this interrelationship is mediated and shaped by techniques that
employ letters’.12
We only need to
extend Illich’s term ‘axioms’ to today’s techniques that employ codes and
hyperlinks, and we have an elegant phrase for capturing the superficially
simple, yet radical, nature of the digital age’s transformations. Illich’s word
‘axioms’ has its root in a Greek word, ‘axioma’, meaning ‘what is valued’; in mathematics, Aristotle used this word to
refer to what is valued so much, as knowledge, that it can be taken for granted
in building an argument or proof. If we have a suspicion that, in the digital
age, the things we take for granted in our imaginative and practical relations
to the world – our ‘axioms’ – are changing, what
better time to revisit the sociology of knowledge with Illich’s historical work
in mind?13
Social theory has offered various routes for making
sense of the transformation in the axioms of everyday life through media, but
each has its limitations. Niklas Luhmann’s ‘systems theory’ appears to offer
insights into the digital world, insofar as the latter can be reduced to the
operation of an interlocking set of systems. But the theoretical price paid for
adopting Luhmann’s system theory is very high: not only assuming that the lived world of everyday experience and social meaning is generally systematic and functionally
differentiated, when in reality it may be much more complex and pluri-centred
than that, but also masking from view the highly motivated and institutionally
directed attempts to impose (or powerfully propose)
systematicity that are increasingly an important feature of the digital
communications infrastructure.14
Another route to making sense of these transformations must be found.
It is more
promising to trace the stretched-out patterns of technological formation and
linkage that underlie how our external actions are organized in the
world. Here Bruno Latour has had enormous influence in reorienting our sense of
what is sociologically interesting. Deeply sceptical about wider notions of
‘society’ and the ‘social’, Latour has rightly insisted we pay attention to the
huge variety of ways in which people and objects become associated with each
other. This is a promising way of registering innovations of practice at a time
when the basics of what we value (the ‘axioms’ of daily life) are being
stretched and transformed by our uses of a new digital infrastructure. But here
too there is a cost, since Latour, in his scepticism towards sociology’s claims
of explanatory order, seems to lose touch with what remains at stake for
everyday actors in interpreting the spaces of
interaction (‘the social’) in which we are entangled. ‘The social’ is not a
space, necessarily, of order; but it is a space where order is at stake,
and where the absence of order brings severe costs. This is one key
contribution of phenomenology: to insist that there is something fundamentally
(and, we might say, naturally) at stake for us, as
human beings, in the order that we manage to make in and of the world, an order
whose normative force goes far beyond the particular arrangements that, as
individuals and collectivities, we assemble. We must therefore hold onto that
sense of what is at stake in ‘the social’ if we are to register the human
dilemmas of the digital age, dilemmas which stem from our continuing attempts
to preserve agency and some satisfactory degree of order
under ever more complex, perhaps contradictory, conditions.15
We do, however,
follow Latour in abandoning the modern idea of ‘society’, if by that we mean a sui generis ‘human’ construction somehow built up
‘against’ nature. Latour is not the only writer to see problems in this modern view of nature, science
and society.16 Indeed two major
philosophical traditions – the Aristotelian tradition, recently revised in
neo-Aristotelian form, and the Hegelian tradition – have insisted on the need
to understand the social not as something opposed to ‘nature’, but as a ‘second
nature’ into which, as human beings, we grow:17
a contingently evolved but, as such, natural tendency to develop institutional
arrangements within which a common life can be lived. Media and communications
infrastructures have become part of this second nature and, as such, may, or
may not, be evolving in ways that are congenial to other human needs and goals.
It is not easy to find a word for this evolving second nature, but it remains
important to hold onto a sense of how the shaping of meaning, over time, takes
on cumulative and inherited forms without which human life is impossible
(). For this we propose the term ‘figurational order’,
building on the word ‘figuration’ which we introduce shortly.18 This figurational
order has always been socially shaped, but potentially now is being dislocated
by the impact of new contradictions, with radical implications for the
sustainability of existing ways of life and forms of social order.
At the root of
our concern as social theorists, therefore, is the question of how we come to
be embedded in a world: that embedding carries for us a moral and
ethical charge. Technologically based media of communication are now
fundamental to the construction of everyday reality, that is, to building and
replicating the world in which we are embedded, but in ways that are producing
new costs, tensions and pain. As Anthony Giddens put it more than two decades
ago, ‘in conditions of late modernity we live “in the world” in a different
sense from previous eras in history’ (). The phenomenological task
of following how the world ‘hangs together’19
for us as human actors – as beings who have no choice but to be dependent on
others – is, we propose, the best route to grasp the sense of contradiction
that we feel in relation to many of the deep transformations within what Jose
van Dijck () has called ‘the age of connectivity’.
The sociologist
who offers most towards understanding the phenomenological contradictions of
our digital age is Norbert Elias. His analysis of modern society’s increasing
‘civilizing’ of the body and mind does not separate the individual from
society. Elias was interested in how a certain form of civilized ‘subject’ is
linked with a certain form of society. This way of thinking becomes much
clearer in his later books such as The Society of Individuals
and especially What is Sociology?. Here Elias
understands the social not as static and given, but as articulated in an
ongoing process. To analyse the process of building and sustaining the social,
Elias introduces the
term ‘figuration’ as a conceptual tool to grasp the complex
problems of interdependence that living together in large numbers generates,
how those problems find solutions. Social change is always in part, Elias
argues, a change at the level of figurations. It is here too – in the detail of
specific figurations, and more complex figurations of figurations, and in the
overall web of the ‘figurational order’ that such figurations constitute – that
the consequences of technological processes of mediation for our possible social worlds are best traced.
Are the
figurations of social life today becoming less positive, more disordered, than those of the past? If so, what social resources can we find to address this? And what
if, as yet, there are none? These are the unsettling questions that our book
tries ultimately to pose and at least begin to answer.
When we pose such
questions, we become aware how far social theory has ignored until now this
emergent media-derived complexity in what it was meant to theorize: ‘the
social’. That standoff is no longer defensible. For the social is mediated, and that mediation is increasingly sustained by manifold technologies of communication: by
‘manifold’, we refer not just to the plurality of today’s media channels and
interfaces, but also to their interlinked nature, and to the many-dimensional
order that results and that encompasses our whole media environment.20
The chapters of Part I of this book are devoted to
unfolding the various layers of this relationship between ‘the social’, ‘media’
and ‘communication’ on a broad, historical scale. We start in Chapter 2 by reflecting on the
social world as a communicative construction. On the basis of this we move into
a historical analysis of the different waves of mediatization that cumulate in
the current stage of deep mediatization (Chapter 3). In Chapter 4 we move to the level of everyday living and
analyse how we live with the complex figurations of a mediatized social world.
In this way, Part I of the book
offers an overall understanding of the construction of the social world under
conditions of deep mediatization.
We are then ready
in Part II to explore
the implications of the social’s mediation for the dimensions of the social
world as building-blocks of everyday experience: for the spaces in and over which the social is enacted (Chapter 5) and the times in and through which the social occurs (Chapter 6); for our grasp of the types
of complexity which the social now displays, because of the increasing
importance of data-based processes that operate, as it were, behind the scenes of
everyday interaction (Chapter 7).
This, in turn,
provides the basis in Part III for
considering agency in the social world and the larger organizational forms that
are built ‘on top of’ this mediated social, as worked through in our practices
as ‘selves’ (Chapter 8), as
‘collectivities’ (Chapter 9), and as
institutions that attempt to order, even govern, the social world (Chapter 10). Only through these
various levels of analysis can we get into view the wider question with which
the book ends: is our ever more technologically mediated life together
sustainable, or at least compatible with maintaining good relations of
interdependence? If not, how can we begin to remedy this?
Across this set
of arguments will be a normative trajectory that underlies our book’s analysis
as a whole: while we want to avoid any naive criticism that claims deep
mediatization is per se ‘good’ or ‘bad’, we reflect
throughout on the question of how far certain forms of mediatization offer
agency to certain figurations of people and institutions, giving them
particular opportunities in the construction of the social world, while
limiting the agency of others. In this sense, we are concerned with how far, at
the highest level of complexity, today’s ‘figurational order’ has negative or
positive implications overall for human lives-in-common. The first part of this
book provides the foundation for such a kind of analysis. In the second and
third parts of the book we reflect from many angles on these questions of
agency in times of deep mediatization. We bring together our sense of how the
figurational order of the digital age fits with the normative demands that
humans are entitled to make of any way of life in Chapter 11, the Conclusion.
In this chapter
we introduce our approach to understanding how communication, and specifically
mediated communication, contribute to the construction of the social world.
This is the essential starting-point, if we are to explain how the social world
changes when it becomes fundamentally interwoven with
media. What does it mean when the social world, as we know it, is constructed
in and through mediated communication? A way of capturing this deep, consistent
and self-reinforcing role of media in the construction of the social world is
to say that the social world is not just mediated but mediatized: that is, changed in its
dynamics and structure by the role that media continuously (indeed recursively)1 play in its
construction.
We do not mean by
this to say that the social world is totally ‘colonized’ – to use a Habermasian
term () – by the media, or subjected throughout to
something as simple or direct as a ‘media logic‘ (). Nor
do we intend to imply that the salience of media in the construction of the
social world operates in the same way everywhere: of course, the degree of media’s interweaving in the social varies in
different regions of the world, as does even what we mean by ‘media’ (). We do mean by this that the social
world has significantly more complexity when its forms and patterns are, in
part, sustained in and through media and their infrastructures. Even if we do
things without directly using media, the horizon of our practices is a social
world for which media are fundamental reference-points and resources. This is
the sense in which we speak about the social world as ‘mediatized’.
The term
‘mediatization’ can be further explained by a more basic reflection on the
concept of communication. Communication is a process necessary to the
construction of a social world: as Hubert Knoblauch puts it, ‘communicative
action [is] the basic process in the social construction of reality’
(). This does not mean that all practices within the
social world are communicative (they are not), but it means more than saying that communication is just one of many
acts we do in the
world (of course it is). Because communication is the set of practices through
which we ‘make sense’ of our world, and build arrangements (simple or complex)
for coordinating our behaviour, the communicative dimension of our practices is
critical to how the social world becomes constructed.
Some social constructivism, as formulated by Berger and Luckmann () for
example, rather underplayed communication in
general, in the course of overplaying ‘language as the
empirical medium of action’ (). As a result, that
approach was poorly placed to grasp the sheer variety of communicative
practices through media. But the inadequacy of that position becomes all the
clearer with deep mediatization (see Chapter 1) when more and more aspects of our daily
practice are saturated by new forms of mediated communication.
Our first step
therefore is to build an approach that understands the social world as fundamentally interwoven with media. Already, we turn
away here from the original thinking of Berger and Luckmann. We also establish
another key difference. While Berger and Luckmann understood their book as a
‘treatise in the sociology of knowledge’ (its subtitle), defined in a rather
universal manner, our starting-point in understanding the construction of the
social world in an age of digital media is fundamentally different. Because media have changed the reference-points of
human practice so dramatically, it is now obvious not only that the social
world is something constructed by us as humans, but
that those processes of construction can only be understood if seen as historically located, with one of the main recent
historical changes being the increasing social relevance of technologies of
mediated communication. In this chapter we sketch the consequences of this for
understanding the social world. The terminology we introduce – everyday reality
and the domains of the social world, institutional facts, and communicative
practices by which we construct the social world as meaningful – will be the
basis for our critical reflection on social agency that we develop over the
course of this book.
We cannot analyse
the social world via a simple division between ‘pure’ face-to-face
communication and a separate presentation of the world to us ‘through’ media.
Many of the communicative practices by which we construct our social world are
media-related ones. Our daily communication comprises much more than direct
face-to-face communication: mediated communication – by television, phones,
platforms, apps, etc. – is interwoven with our face-to-face communication in
manifold ways. Our face-to-face interaction is continuously interwoven with media-related practices: while we talk
to someone, we might check something on our mobile phones, get text messages,
refer to various media contents. Sonia Livingstone () sums this up as ‘the
mediation of everything’. However, because the social world is not just a
series of discrete things laid alongside each other (a first-order complexity)
but a web of interconnections operating on a huge number of levels
and scales, ‘the mediation of everything’ automatically generates new
complexities, since each part of ‘everything’ is itself already mediated. This
huge second-order complexity is what we try to capture by
the term ‘mediatization’, and it derives from the
mediation of the communicative practices that at every level contributes to the
construction of the social world. If we are to grasp how processes of
communicative construction take place across a variety of different media, our
analysis must go to a higher dimension of complexity than is possible by
concentrating on the ‘face to face’ and ‘here and now’.
To ground an
approach like this we make a three-step argument. First, we clarify what we
understand by ‘social world’: what does this term imply? Second, we outline how
the construction of the social world and its everyday reality takes place. And
third, we develop an understanding of the complexity of media and
communication’s role in this process of construction.
In everyday
language, as well as in social sciences, the term ‘social world’ is a more or
less widely used concept. It sometimes requires no further explanation,
indicating the ‘common dimension’ of the world – the ‘empirical world’ in which
we as human beings live. In this sense, for example, Herbert Blumer wrote about
the ‘empirical social world’ () in his famous article entitled
‘What is wrong with social theory?’ This is also the very general sense in
which Tim Dant () described ‘material culture’ as part of the ‘social
world’. In contrast to such general understandings, a very specific concept of
the social world can be found in symbolic interactionism with its so-called
‘social world perspective’ (). From
this perspective, society consists of various bounded ‘social worlds’; for
example, the social world of football playing, the social world of schools, or
the social world of the family. Each of these social worlds – so the argument
goes – is defined by a ‘primary activity’, by certain ‘sites’ where these
activities occur, and by ‘technologies’ and ‘organizations’ that are involved
().
In our view,
these understandings of the social world are either too generalized (more or
less a metaphor for human togetherness) or too narrow (understanding certain
social domains as social worlds).2
Our definition of the
social world is both inclusive and focused at the same time. The social world,
put most simply, is the overall outcome of our joint processes of social –
specifically, communicative – construction. Through the variety of our
sense-making practices, we construct our social world, as something ‘common’ to
us from the beginning. It is in this sense that the philosopher John Searle
() discusses the construction of social reality as ‘making the social
world’.
Such a definition
of the social world echoes the reflections of social phenomenology but in a
more historically sensitive way. We can trace this understanding back to the
book The Phenomenology of the Social World by Alfred Schutz
(). If we follow his arguments, the social world is an intersubjective
world, that is, a world we share with other human beings ().
This creates the possibility that the social world is ‘meaningful, not only for
those living in that world, but for its scientific interpreters as well’
(). Schutz attempted to reconstruct the fundamental
phenomenology of the social world, using in his later work the concept of the
‘lifeworld’ to emphasize its rootedness in our ‘unproblematic’ and ‘natural’
experiences of everyday reality (). Berger and
Luckmann picked this up in their approach to the social construction of
reality, which for them, too, is based in ‘everyday life’ (). While we will have some critical things to say about the
limits of some work in this classic tradition of social phenomenology, there
are three fundamental points we can learn from it.
1. The social world is intersubjective. Describing the
social world requires an analysis that considers the various subjective
perspectives of the different actors within the social world, but, at the same
time, taking into account that the social world has an existence beyond (that
is, independent of) the individual. The social world existed before we as
individuals were born, and it will last when as individuals we are gone.
Various media are important means towards securing the intersubjective
character of our social world. Media offer the possibility to communicate
across time and space, developing a shared understanding of the social world
and representing the social world for further reflection and action. Media here
include not only so-called mass media, which, in the form of broadcasting and
print, for a long time constituted the dominant definitions of the social
world. Media here also include the various digital platforms we use to
communicate with our friends and colleagues and to represent these social
relations. The intersubjectivity of today’s social world is something we
articulate to a distinct degree through our many media in structures of
connection or, as we will call them later, figurations.
2. Everyday reality is the
foundation of the social world. According to Schutz, everyday
reality is constitutive for our living in the social world. What
does this mean? As Alfred Schutz and Thomas Luckmann formulated it, everyday
life ‘is the province of reality in which man [sic!] continuously participates
in ways which are at once inevitable and patterned’ (). It is the ‘region of reality’ in which we can engage as individual human
beings and which we can change through our bodily operations. Berger and
Luckmann went further, describing this everyday reality as deserving the title
of the ‘paramount reality’ (), which grounds
the possibility of a social world. It is important here, as elsewhere, to be
clear on what we are, and are not, saying if we follow this classical
phenomenological position. Because we have bodies and it is only through the capacities of our bodies that we act
in the world, there is no other possible grounding of our social world than our
embodied actions: by ‘everyday life’ we mean then, quite simply, what each of
us does in the world, individually and in relation to each
other. But what we do in the world is not somehow separate, or cut off, from
the technological means by which we act in the world. Berger and Luckmann, as
was common in sociology for a long time, wrote as if there is first face-to-face ‘everyday life’ and then there is a supplement: what we do,
technologically, to mediate that everyday life. This was hardly true through
most of human history, at least since the discovery of writing, but today it
would simply be bizarre to ignore how the reality of everyday life is
inseparably linked with media, when supermarket checkouts read our credit cards
with our personal data, when our everyday communication happens to a high
degree via mobile devices, platforms and interactive systems, and when children
learn to play through the means of internet-connected tablets. Under these
circumstances it makes no sense at all to think of everyday reality as a ‘pure
experience’ that can be contrasted with a (somehow secondary) ‘mediated
experience’. Everyday reality, from the beginning, is in many respects
mediated, which means that the complex social world of interconnections constructed from everyday life’s
foundations is mediatized.
3. The social world is internally differentiated in domains.
The social world is not one homogeneous thing; ‘it is internally diverse,
exhibit[ing] a multi-form structure’ (). The structuring
force of the social world is quite consistent with much of our everyday life
being de facto lived within ‘sub-universes of human existence’ (), ‘a variety of small “worlds”’ () like, for
example, single-purpose communities, or work and leisure groups. This perhaps
sounds like symbolic interactionism’s ‘social worlds perspective’ (), but a risk with that latter approach was to neglect the common links and
constraining forces that sustain those sub-worlds as structurally related.
We would rather say that the social world is differentiated into various
domains. Each of these social domains is defined by a shared practical
orientation of the humans acting within this domain. That said, we cannot
understand these domains as closed systems, in the way traditional systems
theory does. The boundaries of each domain are rather blurred and in various
ways they intersect with each other. Yet they are also, in principle, linked to
each other as part of a larger social world. Media play a double role in
relation to these social domains: first they stimulate the differentiation of these domains by offering a high
variety of symbolic resources; second, they support the intersection of these domains by sustaining
communication across them.
In summary, the
social world is the intersubjective sphere of the social relations that we as
human beings experience. Those relations are rooted in everyday reality, a
reality nowadays always interwoven with media to some degree. The social world
is, in turn, differentiated into many domains of meaning, even though it is
also bound together by multiple relations of interdependence and constraint.
Notice that we
have talked so far of a social world, not ‘society’. For sure, we cannot avoid
considering how our various overlapping experiences of the social world contribute
to, and are embedded within, ‘social orders’ () of various sorts,
including at the level of ‘national societies’. Those wider orders impact on
our possible sense of membership of a social world often in violent ways;
increasingly, through globalization, we live in a social world that is shaped
by multiple, overlapping and (in their effects) contradictory social orders.
But – and this is the key move of social phenomenology – those orders are not
primary. A social world can be built, and
experienced, without them, and so their complexities
and contradictions do not contradict the possibility of a social world itself.
This enables us, for example, to hold onto the fundamental notion of the social
world, while avoiding any assumption of ‘methodological nationalism’ (): we do not take
the borders of ‘national societies’, whatever their practical importance for
various purposes, as ‘natural’ limits of the social world. We also avoid
assuming that any single ‘society’ (whether local, regional, national or
global) is the only and exclusive ‘order’ in which the social world is embedded
for particular sets of actors. Media today play a key role in the proliferating
complexity of social ordering, that is, in shaping the possibilities
for social order. We will come back later in Chapter 10 to the question of social order, but on
various scales, not just those of the nation. With deep mediatization, it is
often, as we will find, ambiguities at the
level of social ordering that characterize our experience. All the more
important then that we take the social world in general (not any particular
social order) as the departure of our analysis.
The social world
is not just a given. We make it, as human
beings; it is, in this sense, socially constructed. This is the fundamental
position of social constructivism, and it has nothing to do with the philosophical
traps of anti-materialism or idealism (). Indeed it involves insisting that the social is material, a materiality that is not a ‘pre-given’
stratum into which human beings are inserted, but a product of human
interaction itself, with all its power-relations and inequalities. This basic
idea of what we call materialist phenomenology is perhaps self-explanatory, but
things get more complicated if we ask what ‘construction’ means in detail. As
for the trap of idealism, our fundamental point is that the social world is
grounded not in ideas, but in everyday action,
that is, in practice: the reality in which we as human beings act
and that we articulate by our interaction. The approach to social construction that is involved in materialist
phenomenology should not therefore be confused with the idealist notion that
the world does not exist except through our imagination of it. On the contrary,
we insist that there is one material world, with determinate features, in which
we act: as John Searle puts it, ‘we live in exactly one world, not two or three
or seventeen’ ().
Factual claims
about the material world can be made within any number of frameworks of
understanding, all of which at some level refer to values and orientations that
may not be universally held. So it was possible for large groups of people to
believe, at the same time, that the earth moved around the sun, or that the sun
moved round the earth, even if only one of those factual claims could be true;
and the degree of consensus over such frameworks of understanding is
historically contingent. However, to the extent that there is consensus, those
sharing the consensus can use shared procedures to agree on specific facts, and
other frameworks of understanding
can be built by reference to those facts, including frameworks for constructing
everyday reality in a specific way. There is, in other words, one physical
world, but many possible, and even conflicting, constructions of it.
In thinking about
the facts of the world, we need to consider the special status of social facts.
Émile Durkheim in his early outline of the discipline of sociology used the
term ‘social facts’ to describe ‘any way of acting [. . .] which is general
over the whole of a given society whilst having an existence of its own,
independent of its individual manifestations’ ().
What Durkheim calls ‘social facts’ are very close to what philosopher John
Searle calls ‘institutional facts’ ()3 and have some crucial
features (pointed out by Searle) which distinguish them from, say, facts about
the natural physical world. Institutional facts are constituted by people
recognizing and accepting certain common rules and functions, and so they only exist to the extent that people go on accepting those things: that is, they exist when people continue to act according to those common
rules and functions and without that, they cease to exist ().
This brings us to
the necessity of defining institutions. The process of social construction
spreads far beyond the domains of what, in everyday terms, we would recognize
as institutions (corporations, courts, schools, governments). Berger and
Luckmann point out the importance of a wider process of ‘institutionalization’
which involves not only habit at the level of individual actors, but, more
subtly, the way actors mutually adjust their expectations of each other: what
Berger and Luckmann, following Schutz, call the reciprocal typification of
habitualized actions (). From this perspective,
even the family, which typifies particular forms of action in terms of types of
actors (‘father’, ‘mother’, ‘current partner’, ‘child’, ‘aunt’, and so forth), is
part of the process of institutionalization. So too are our habits of mobile
communication, which sustain for us our everyday space of interaction with
family, friends and work colleagues. In this last respect, media’s involvement
in processes of institutionalization has expanded with deep mediatization, and
is no longer limited to the role of large-scale media organizations and their
authority over the changing construction of the social world. This also
includes institutions on a much higher level of complexity, so-called
‘institutional fields’ () such as education, economy
and politics where distinctive kinds of social domains come together on the
basis of distinctive relations of meaning. Building on Bourdieu’s () theory
of fields, this approach emphasizes the institutionalized
character of each social field and its different sorts of capital.
Many
institutional facts have a basic feature that derives from their basis in
constitutive rules of the form ‘X counts as Y in context Z’ (): that is, they are context-relative. In addition, they are often ordered in
hierarchies. So, for example, the fact that, in chess, a move that captures the
king is called ‘checkmate’ and ends the game is subordinate to the fact that
there is a game with certain properties and rules which is called ‘chess’; if
that game stops being recognized as a game, then the institutional facts
constituted by its specific rules automatically fall away, too. Because a
special feature of institutional facts is that they are constituted by people
continuing to accept them – that is, they exist only and insofar as
they are reproduced continuously – there has been a strong temptation to claim
that all of everyday reality is like that: that is, it exists only through its
regular reproduction in the form of performed acceptance. This
approach is known as ‘structuration theory’, one of the core principles of
which is, according to its proponent Anthony Giddens (), that ‘the rules and resources drawn upon in the
production and reproduction of social action are at the same time the means of
system reproduction’: this is what he calls ‘the duality of structure’. But
there are certain problems with this view, which we discuss next.
While it clearly
follows from the basic features of institutional facts that some elements of everyday reality exist by virtue of
‘structuration’ over time and across space (rather than being abstract facts
that apply to all time and space), it is not plausible to say that all elements of everyday reality are the result, and only the result, of ongoing reproduction through
action.
‘Resources’
certainly are constituted, in part, by institutional facts. So, if the
authority of a king is considered a resource, it depends on people recognizing
that authority and acting upon it, whatever their grounds for doing so (they
may have none: the emperor’s new clothes scenario). Yet the resource of, say,
the global financial system surely involves many elements that are not
institutional facts, but rather the arrangement of material objects in highly
ordered ways (). However, ‘structuration theory’ tends
to blur this by claiming that society is made up of rules (that is, social
facts) and resources, and depends on both rules and
resources being reproduced through our ongoing actions in the world.
The existence of
resources, unlike rules or institutional facts, is generally not subject to the
control or influence of social actors, not least because of the distributed
materiality of many of these resources. What counts is the interplay between institutional facts and resources, as
William Sewell notes (). A general problem for all accounts that think of social reality as
‘structure’ is how far they can recognize the degrees of agency
that actors have even within a highly patterned resource distribution. This
varies depending on which aspect of structure we are talking about. So, as
Sewell says, the structure of language is very durable, but the degree to which
it constrains specific linguistic actions is weak, whereas political structures
may be much less durable, while constraining action in highly specific ways
(). Indeed, the ‘strength’ of structure – the force of its
constraining power – is of great importance in relation to today’s growing
information infrastructure: it is part of what binds the social world together
notwithstanding its diversity, but perhaps in ways that are not durable, but
fast-changing.
There may even be
times and places when different structures – different institutional facts, and
different systems of rules and interpretations that underlie them – potentially
apply to the same situation. This is exactly what happens
when actions in everyday life are performed on online platforms within certain
affordances and constraints, yet similar acts are performed elsewhere according
to different constraints. Such conflicts are deeply disruptive and may trigger
situations where important classes of institutional facts disappear, because they no longer are accepted by
sufficient numbers of those who are potentially affected by them (). With deep mediatization, major new infrastructures for human
interaction and socialization have been built in a matter of two decades, which
means (whether we acknowledge it or not) that the construction of everyday
reality has itself become subject to major new disturbance and
conflict.
It is important,
however, before we get to those larger disruptions, to say more about the
process of construction as such. We have
talked so far at a general level about the social world and its construction,
and have been explicit about the degrees of contingency (if you like, the constitutive uncertainty) inherent to this term. These
uncertainties seem rather different from the degrees of uncertainty about basic
physical facts; for example, that the earth revolves around the sun (although
every ‘fact’ only appears as such within a certain framework of reference and
such frameworks have not remained static throughout history). In spite however
of the contingencies inherent to institutional facts, their consistent place
within everyday life generally encourages us to equate them with reality itself. It is important, however, not to make
this logical slide.
Here a recent discussion by the French sociologist
Luc Boltanski is helpful.4
For Boltanski, ‘reality tends to coincide with what appears to hang together [.
. .] [that is,] with order’ (). Two points are crucial to Boltanski.
First, that the ‘everyday reality’ of the social world is not all there is,
since what is constructed as reality stands out against a larger set
of possibilities which forms the background to whatever can be constructed as the ‘everyday reality’ of the
social world.5
Second, based on the first point, we must ‘abandon [. . .] the idea of an
implicit [and fixed] agreement which would somehow be imminent in the
functioning of social life’. Instead, we should ‘put dispute
and, with it, the divergence of points of view,
interpretation and usages at the heart of social bonds’ (). If we follow Boltanski, this means diverging
sharply from ‘social constructionism’ as generally interpreted. Like ‘standard’ social constructionism, it foregrounds
agency, and specifically recognizes the ongoing agency of human beings and
their institutions, in the construction of reality, that is, the sociological
reality of ‘reality’ construction.6 Unlike ‘standard’
social constructionism, this approach in addition emphasizes the irreducible
and conflicted uncertainty at the heart of the
process of social construction: the unending conflicts about the ontology of
the social or, as Luc Boltanski puts it more poetically, ‘the whatness of what
is [. . .], what matters, what has value, what it is right to respect and look
at twice’ ().
Let us say
something more specific about the construction of institutions. The basic idea
of materialist phenomenology – that the social world depends on the material
processes whereby human beings construct it – does not rely on an account of
institutions. But it is beyond dispute that, over time, social life has come to
require, as it has grown more complex, various stabilizations of resource
within institutions. Those institutions have become associated with particular
types of practice, including practices of interpreting the social world in a
particular way. Institutions play an important role, down to the level of
everyday language, in constructing reality and making possible a particular
reality’s appearance of hanging together against a background of much greater
flux (). More than that, particular
institutions (such as the law) are distinctive in that to them is ‘delegated
the task of stating the whatness of what is’ (), that is,
the general representation of social reality. This repeats, from a
different perspective (that of the institutions which try to stabilize it),
Searle’s fundamental point about the underlying contingency of social facts,
but rejects any functionalist idea that ‘social construction’ is equivalent to
a continuous and integrated social
order without conflict, tension or institutional effort. The institutions with
specific responsibility for representing reality in its general and specific
forms have gone on developing throughout history, and in the current age of
internet-based connectivity include institutions as seemingly remote from
everyday intervention as the algorithms at work within search engines
(). But, as Adrian MacKenzie notes, even the software that
implements such processes ‘is very intimately linked with how code is read and
by whom or by what [whether] by person or machine’ (): in
other words, algorithms, software, and databases too are not ‘reality’, but constructed reality.
The social world
and its everyday reality – at every level – is not a metaphysical notion but a
concept inextricably linked to action. As Ian
Hacking, following in the tradition of Wittgenstein, put it, ‘we [. . .] count
as real what we can use to intervene in the world to affect something else, or
what the world can use to affect us’ (). Put another way,
everyday reality is the context in which actors are ‘immersed in the flux of life’ () and so they must
act. The complexity, however, is that different social forces have varying
degrees of power over what comes to count as everyday reality, and
the role of social sciences is to get at such power, abstracting it from the
seemingly unproblematic everyday order that we need to endure as acting beings.
For Boltanski, it is law that is particularly important as an institutional
force constructing reality, and we do not deny law’s importance. But we would
suggest that communication, media and their infrastructures matter
increasingly today in ‘stating the whatness of what is’.
Let us sum up our
argument to this point. The social world has a reality of its own – everyday
reality. This social world and its everyday reality are constructed. This means
they are not naturally given but ‘made’ by human practices and the
side-consequences of those practices. However, this does not mean that the social world is ‘random’ or
‘idiosyncratic’. On the contrary, this process of construction is based on many
patterns of practice whose validity is generally accepted (institutional
facts). Institutional facts involve the work of institutions (in the everyday
sense – major concentrations of material resource, like governments and courts)
but also broader patterns of institutionalization: all contribute to the
construction of the social world in a process Berger and Luckmann call ‘objectivation’.
Indeed, we depend on it seeming that way to us: social conditions where the
interpretation of reality becomes itself the site of intense contestation (for
example, societies on the path towards dictatorship) are times of the greatest
anxiety and distress. The paradox of the social world is that it is both grounded in complex and historically
contingent interrelations of individual and collective action, yet tends to be
grasped by us as a single interconnected reality. We know that we live in just one material world:
we cannot individually or collectively choose another world in
which we prefer to act. But the specific and (relatively) stable features of the social world in which we live are
themselves part of the construction that institutions
strive to sustain, against the background of a more complex and uncertain flux
of possible states of the social world.
So far we have
outlined a materialist phenomenological approach to understanding how the
social world is constructed. This immediately provokes another question: what
is the role of communication in this process? Communication as a meaning-making
practice is the core of how the social world gets constructed as meaningful, while media and their infrastructures have
become increasingly crucial for everyday communicative practices. This has
implications for how we think about social constructivism. Already in the 1930s
Alfred Schutz had a certain feeling for the importance of media – something he
shared with some other great exponents of social science (). If we follow Schutz (), the social
world in which we live can be divided into two spheres. This is, first, the
‘world of consociates’ (Umwelt), our
‘directly experienced social reality’. Second, there is the sphere of the
‘world of contemporaries’ (Mitwelt). For each
of us, ‘directly experienced social reality’ – the reality of the face-to-face
situation – is the core of our experience of the social world. It is where we
are present with all our senses, and where we experience the other and our
social relationship to him or her in a direct way. The ‘world of
contemporaries’ is somewhat distant from this: we know that they exist and that
they build with us the social world, but we are not in direct contact with
them.
Interestingly
Schutz himself in his early writings indicated some caution about the
distinction between consociates and contemporaries, or more crudely, between
interactors near and far (). Schutz argued that, because of media, the distinction between face-to-face
experiences and other experiences of the social world as already less absolute
and more of a continuous gradation. As early as the 1930s, Schutz
used the example of the telephone to explain this: ‘imagine a face-to-face
conversation, followed by a telephone call, followed by an exchange of letters,
and finally messages
exchanged through a third party. Here too we have a gradual progression from
the world of immediately experienced social reality to the world of
contemporaries’ (). Other examples he discusses include the
role of media for constructing ‘collective entities’ ()
like the nation.7
Therefore, media play a role in the increasing ‘mediatedness’ (Mittelbarkeit) of our experience of the social world,
which affects how our social world is constructed as a reality.8
Back in the
1930s, Schutz could only have had a first impression of this complex connection
between technological media of communication and the changing ‘mediatedness’ of
the social world. He called for a more detailed analysis of the ‘contact
situations’ () between direct and indirect experience, but
could not develop it. In the context of processes of deep mediatization, we
must elaborate Schutz’s early insights much further.
Today’s forms of
‘mediatedness’ have potentially deepened in at least four ways unforeseen by
Schutz. First, as Schutz already saw, we have an increasing mediation of our
communicative stream, that is, a shift in the overall balance from direct
communication to mediated communication as the regular means of sustaining
social relations. But, unimaginably for Schutz or anyone writing up to the
1980s, even our mediated communication can have enhancements which make them
closer in specific responses to the face-to-face communication; for instance,
video calls with simultaneous text messaging and email stream, enabling two
parties to share simultaneous focused attention on the same external
communicative stream, that is, an email attachment or website (contrast the
simple phone call). A second deepening is the embedding not just of particular
communicative streams into everyday life, but of the inputs from past communications (continuous streams of information
from both Mitwelt and Umwelt): think of
the feedback loop that operates when, while communicating with somebody else
face to face, we are also checking information on earlier interactions on our
smartphone, involving other communication partners. We are involved in a
‘multi-level’ construction of the social world, acting on various ‘levels’ of
communication at the same time. Third, and also unimaginable to Schutz, is the
already discussed continuous availability of media as a current resource in face-to-face communication, from
showing pictures on one’s digital device to the use of video even in the most
intimate of settings. And fourth, we are living through an integration of all these three shifts into
the habits and norms of all communicative behaviour, both
face to face and mediated. Increasingly we expect that our comments and
gestures can be mediated for future commentary, circulation, etc., unless, that is, we insist they should not be
re-circulated ().
Our communication
today in the here and now is thoroughly interwoven with various media. The
point is not that the face to face becomes less important, but that in order to sustain its primacy (for example, the
importance of family meal times) we now require continuous mediated coordination, within processes of ‘connected
presence’ that enable us to coordinate the possibility of that face-to-face
situation ().9
We regularly rely on having access to communication inputs comprised of past
processes of mediated communication: much of that information is comprised of
data automatically collected via platforms, which then feeds back into our
perception of ourselves and our perception of ‘others’. As a result, the social
world can no longer be understood in terms of classic social constructionism,
which claimed that the ‘most important experience of others takes place in the
face-to-face situation’ (). It is not just that
media extend direct experience via a gradual process towards more indirect
experiences: from the outset our social world is suffused with technological
media of communication, and the ‘directness’ and ‘mediatedness’ of experience
are inextricably interwoven with each other. In this respect, media are
changing not only our Mitwelt but, more basically, our Umwelt: ‘our directly experienced social reality’, as
Schutz put it. This goes beyond mere definition10
into questions of action, what we can do in the world: technologically based
media of communication are bringing about the refiguring of the world in and on
which we act.
We cannot grasp
this transformation unless we understand communication as action and
practice. While these terms – action and practice – have different
origins and nuances of meaning, the core idea linked with both terms is the
same: to communicate is a form of ‘doing’ comparable to other forms of ‘human
doing’, like, for example, constructing a table. As language is so important
for social construction, our ‘communicative doing’ is as far-reaching as our
‘physical doing’. The case of performative rituals – for example, rites of
passage like ‘educational qualifications’ or ‘marriages’ – is just a more
elaborate version of the same basic point: typically they are acts of
communication. In many cases it is just one word or phrase – a ‘yes’ or ‘I do’ when getting
married – that has considerable consequences for the life of a person. As
pragmatism in linguistics emphasized (), we should take communicative action as being just as real in its effects
as other forms of human action.
Communicative
action is inherently ‘social’: it is a practice of interaction. This means that
communication doesn’t just ‘happen’, but that we communicate on the basis of
the objectivizations of language that we have learned in the process of our
socialization. We learn not only the basic communicative signs, but also
patterns of how to communicate: the way to ‘question’, to ‘answer’,
to ‘discuss’, etc., is based on certain social patterns – ‘rules’ based in
institutional facts – which we learn during our socialization. Such patterns
can have a high level of complexity, including ‘schemes’ showing how to
articulate a ‘speech’ in a correct way or how a multilayered ‘dispute’ should
take place. But regardless of how complex these patterns are, they are built on
the basis of forms of communication that remain in place independently of the
concrete contents of communication.11
Communication is
a complex process, with many levels, some more consciously formulated than
others; communication is a complex skill that, to be performed, draws on many
types of socialized competence, and we cannot always say why we communicate as
we do. Communication is based on what Giddens () calls ‘practical
conscious[ness]’: people have the capacity to act in a communicatively
appropriate manner. But they are not necessarily in a position to express
discursively this practical knowledge of ‘how to do communication’.
Allowing for this
complexity, we define communication to mean any form of symbolic interaction
either conscious and planned or habitualized and situated. We also use the term
‘communicative’ to refer to any thing or action that is related to, or has the
property of being, ‘communication’ in this broad sense. Communication depends
upon the use of signs, which humans learn during socialization and which, as
symbols, are for the most part arbitrary so that they are founded upon social
rules. Interaction here means mutually oriented action, which usually does,
although it need not, depend on a wider set of interrelations (that is, a
‘social’ context). Communication is required for there to be a social world at
all, because it is the key means by which the
interactions and interrelations that make the world social are performed. But
the social world of everyday reality also involves many non-communicative
processes too.
The role of
communication as a process in the construction of the social world can be
understood, in more detail, as working through a number of levels. First, there
are communicative actions, that is, single acts of communication, such as an
‘order’, a ‘question’, or a ‘statement’, that share a distinct and bounded form
linked to the specific action which that act performs. Second, there are communicative practices, that is, groups of
communicative actions that together constitute a larger unit; for example, the
practice of discussion. Various actions – ‘questioning’, ‘replying’,
‘contradicting’, etc. – may come together, sometimes in a single flow and
sometimes as part of wider practices. Of course, our practices of communication
are interwoven with other forms of action and our use of objects,12 and we must consider
these complex interrelations if we want to arrive at an understanding of the
character of a communicative practice. And even practices that we do not
consider to be primarily communicative may have a communicative dimension:
we can therefore imagine human practice as a continuum between ‘pure
occupation’ (no communication: for example, a physical task performed without
commentary or accompanying symbols) and ‘pure communication’ (a conversation
without any other simultaneous actions).
The third and
fourth levels concern how the social world is built up out of practices of communication. So, on the third
level, for example, the social domain of an office environment is
incomprehensible unless one grasps the interrelations between the many sets of
practices (with their underlying acts) in which people are involved. But those
interrelations are themselves not accidental, but structured: they involve ‘forms’ of action in which the performers recognize
themselves to be involved (for example, ‘preparing for a sales conference’, or
‘doing an audit’ or ‘designing a new web platform’), each form involving the
convergence of a number of practices. Or, on a fourth level and still larger
scale, there are ‘patterns’ made up from the articulation
together of communicative forms towards certain aggregate effects at the level
of institutional fields: for example, reinforcing the power of one set of
actors over another set of actors. The whole field of education (comprised as
it is of patterns of complex communicative forms, involving many coordinated
actors and their acts and practices) can be understood in this way.
Institutions play a key role in reinforcing such patterned inequalities of
power through the organization of communicative action.
All these forms
of communication – on various levels of complexity –are processes of
construction: a meaningful social world is
therefore built up by acts of communication. And these happen through media, relying on an infrastructure of mediated
communication that of course is not a neutral tool but brings with it certain
consequences. But what are media? Up to now, when discussing media, we have
implicitly referred to what we might call technologically based media of
communication, that is, we have excluded ‘generalized symbolic media’ like
‘money’ just as we excluded ‘primary media’ like ‘language’. Therefore, our
focus has been on these technologically based means of communication that extend or modify our basic human possibilities of
communication (). These include the modern mass media
like television, radio or printed newspaper, but also the mobile devices and
platforms we use to communicate with each other, including the companies that are
‘behind’ these platforms and infrastructures. Therefore, we need an
understanding of media that is specific enough to focus our reflections on
technological media of communication, but at the same time open enough to
capture their contemporary variety.
By media therefore we mean technologically based media of
communication which institutionalize communication. Media institutionalize our communicative practices on various
levels. We are moving here from practices not just to forms (watching
television) but also to complex patterns of practices: the level of how we
arrange ourselves in the moment of media use, the level of forms and patterns
of our communication through a medium, and the level of a medium as a certain
organization – to name just the most important levels. Linked with such
processes of institutionalization is the materialization of a
medium, as a way of interfacing with the world. We use the term
‘materialization’ in a comprehensive sense, referring here both to the material
presence of each medium and at the same time the norms and beliefs about ‘how
things are’ in relation to this medium, including the habits we develop with
regard to and around this medium. Each medium has a characteristic materiality:
not only the materiality of the device as such (the TV set, the mobile phone,
the computer, etc.), but also the materiality of the underlying communication
infrastructure: the cable network, the satellites, the broadcasting stations,
and so on. ‘Naturalization’ is often an aspect of this materiality: certain
forms and material aspects of media use, over time, have come to be so basic to
everyday action that they seem ‘natural’. For example, it seems to be ‘natural’
to use the radio as a broadcasting medium centred on a particular communicative
‘centre’ because its existing infrastructure suggests this. In the same sense
it seems to be ‘natural’ to use internet platforms for networking because they
are coded like that. As soon as a medium acquires a certain materiality, it
comes to seem to social actors reified; as Bruno Latour () put it,
technology is ‘society made durable’. And in a certain sense we can find this
idea already within the concept of ‘affordances’ (): using this
concept, each medium
has a characteristic, or ‘affordance’, that offers the possibility for specific
actions as part of its ‘usability’.
Focusing on media
not only as objects but also as means of communication, we can link these ideas
with the ‘double articulation’ () of each medium:
the ‘content dimension’ and ‘object dimension’. Both refer to a medium’s
fundamental character as a means of communication that involves at the same
time institutionalization and materialization. Because of this, media are never
neutral in the act of communication. They are a stage in how our communication
is ‘moulded’ (). And this is the reason why our
communicative construction of the social world and its everyday reality changes when media are involved in this process. All
forms of media communication have in common that they extend communication from
a mere ‘here’ and ‘now’ into a ‘there and now’ () and enable us to
communicate across space and time. Therefore, most situations of media
communication are, in some sense, ‘translocal’: through processes of
communication, they link up activity and meaning-making across various
localities (even the act of updating one’s contacts on one’s phone can rely on
the background activity of a distributed memory function).
What can we conclude
from our reflections in this chapter? Referring back to the question we posed
at its beginning – how does the social world change when it fundamentally
becomes interwoven with media? – our main argument has been the need to develop
a theory of the social world that does not any more take face-to-face
interaction as its unquestioned centre. Even when we communicate directly, we
do so by reference to everyday reality that is deeply interwoven with media. To
capture the complex consequences of this, we need to develop the term
‘mediatization’, a concept we will unpack further in Chapter 3 when we read the history of the social world
in terms of successive overlapping ‘waves’ of mediatization. Thinking about the
social world and its different domains as ‘mediatized’ means grasping that its
construction involves practices of communication that are, in turn, moulded by
the long-term processes of institutionalization and materialization that we
refer to as ‘media’. The more intricately the construction of the social world
becomes implicated in our uses of media, the more intricate are the
interdependences between media themselves. That is the double shift we
characterize by the term ‘deep mediatization’,
which we also take further in the next chapter. In times of deep mediatization,
to grasp the communicative construction of our social world, it is not enough
to consider single media in isolation: our analysis must go to a higher level
of complexity.
Compare Giddens’ idea that social structures
‘recursively organize’ social practices’ (). On the latter, we agree with Boltanski and Thévenot
() that ‘we have to give up the idea of associating worlds with
groups’. We however avoid that term because it seems
disconnected from the sociological specificity of institutions, but come back
to the nature of institutionalization later. Boltanski () underlines the common ground
between his account and that of social phenomenology, by referring explicitly
to the work of Alfred Schutz, while at the same time being deeply critical and
suspicious of a too consensual reading of the notion of ‘institutions’ (). Boltanski calls this wider space ‘world’, as opposed
to (what we take for) ‘reality’. See also discussion in Couldry
(). Boltanski’s original phrase is ‘la realité de la
realité’ (). What we find here is a very early form of the
argument that was later brought forward by Benedict Anderson () and John B.
Thompson (),
namely, that we cannot understand the emergence of the modern nation state
without considering the (mass) media. In the original translation of Schutz’ ‘Der Auf bau
der sozialen Welt’, the term ‘mediacy’ is used for the German Mittelbarkeit (). However, we
prefer the term ‘mediatedness’ as it sounds more natural in the English
language. Compare Christensen (), discussing
Berger and Luckmann. W. I. Thomas and D. S. Thomas’ famous ‘theorem’
(that ‘if men define situations as real, they are real in their
consequences’ () does not therefore go deep
enough. This said, certain kinds of content are
communicated more via specific forms of communication than are others. This
becomes obvious if we consider institutionalized contexts of communication, for
example, in the field of religion. Here, religious contents are communicated
via certain forms of communication (the ‘prayer’,‘ ‘homily’, etc.), which we
recognize via their forms as religious. However, these
religious forms can be transferred to other contexts, for example, when a
certain form of religious presenting is used to convince someone in a political
speech. Examples like these demonstrate that there are certain links between
form and content, and that we cannot see them as completely independent.
Analytically, though, it is important to make this distinction if we want to
understand how communication takes place as both action and practice. As we might say in the terminology of Actor Network
Theory, communicative practices are carried out in networks of ‘human actors’
and ‘non-human actants’ ().
This chapter
offers a rereading of the history of media and communications, as an
entry-point to a theoretical argument about how the
construction of the social world through communications has changed over time.
Some versions of media history1
have a tendency to offer a narrative of the influence of single media, the emergence of which supposedly
transformed society. A recent book offers a ‘push theory of media effects’
(), that is, a theory of how the emergence of each ‘new’ medium
had an identifiable ‘effect’ on culture and society. While we do not deny that
each medium has a specificity that ‘shapes’ or ‘moulds’ communication in
particular ways, such a medium-based perspective ignores the many overlapping
layers of communication (acts, practices, forms, patterns) whereby the social
world is constructed. We need a more far-reaching understanding of the
mediatization of culture and society to grasp the current transformations of
the social world and our ‘media environment’ ().
Communications’ role in history does not move, like a relay-race, from one
‘influencing’ medium to another. It is rather a continuous and cumulative enfolding of communications within
the social world that has resulted today in ever more complex relations between
the media environment, social actors, and therefore the social world.
Specifically, we
argue in this chapter that the history of mediatization over the past five to
six centuries can be understood in terms of three successive and overlapping
waves in which modes of communications have developed and their interrelations
have become significantly more complex: the wave of mechanization,
the wave of electrification and the wave of digitalization. Arguably, we are now living at the
start of a fourth wave, the wave of datafication, a
point we discuss towards the end of the chapter. The latest wave(s) of
digitalization and datafication correspond to phases of deep mediatization, because they are associated with a
much more intense embedding of media in social processes than ever before.
Towards the end of the chapter, we introduce the term ‘media manifold’ – that
is, a large ‘universe’ of variously connected digital media through which (in various figurations) we
actualize social relations – as a way of capturing the multiple
relations to the overall media environment that characterize everyday life in
times of deep mediatization.
Over recent years
mediatization has become an important concept in media and communications
research for grasping media-related transformations in society (). The relevance of this concept derives from the increasing salience of
technologically based media of communication in contemporary cultures and
societies. As we argued elsewhere (),
mediatization is a concept that helps us to analyse critically the interrelation between changes in media and
communications on the one hand, and changes in culture and society on the
other. It is not a concept of ‘media effects’, but rather a dialectical – two-way – concept for understanding how
the transformations of culture and society are interwoven with specific changes
in media and communications. We cannot theorize media and communications as
‘external’ influences on culture and society, for the simple reason that they
are an integral part of it. At this general level, mediatization has
quantitative as well as qualitative dimensions. In its quantitative dimensions,
mediatization refers to the increasing temporal, spatial and social spread of
mediated communications; over time we have become more and more used to
communicating across distance via media in an increasing range of contexts. But
mediatization also refers to qualitative dimensions, that is, to the social and
cultural differences that mediated communications make at higher levels of
organizational complexity.
For clarity, it
is worth drawing a sharp distinction between the related terms ‘mediation’ and
‘mediatization’ (). While mediation refers to the process of communication in
general – that is, the way that technology-based communication involves the
ongoing mediation of meaning-production () – mediatization describes the higher-order processes of
transformation and change across society that
result from mediation going on at every level of interaction. More than that,
mediatization as a term enables us to grasp how, over time, the consequences
that multiple processes of mediated communication have for the construction of
the social world have themselves changed with the
emergence of different kinds of media and different types of relation between
media. Mediatization is, in short, a meta-process (), a process of change in how social processes
go on through media and are articulated together in
ever more complex organizational patterns.
It is important
also to see the various stages of mediatization in a transcultural
perspective, which means grasping the multiple forms that mediatization has
taken over its long duration in various sites across the world: these
variations cannot be neatly mapped onto the boundaries of specific nations or
national cultures (), because media as resources of
symbolic power are entangled inevitably with the development of elites,
particularly urban elites. We reject also any simple linking of mediatization
with (European) modernity ().
Certainly ‘the development of media organizations’ –
that is,independent organizations for the production and circulation of
communications, that ‘first appeared in the second half of the fifteenth
century and have expanded their activities ever since’ () –
was a precondition for European modernity, even though the theoretical term mediatization did not emerge until the early
twentieth century ().
There is a danger here, however, of framing mediatization in a too Eurocentric
way (): the
idea that mediatization involves independent media organizations – that is,
organizations independent of political or religious institutions – does not apply
to every region of the world, like Latin America, where media organizations are
much more interwoven with religious, political or other social institutions
(). It is especially problematic to link
mediatization too closely with European specificities and then assume that it
unfolds identically wherever we go in the world. Indeed, the term ‘medium’
itself involves a certain form of classification, and may be bundled together
in one set of means of communication in one cultural context and in another set
in another context (). Therefore, we should not accept a
one-dimensional understanding of modernization based on specific media (). However, none of that means we should abandon the term ‘media’
entirely (and as a consequence devalue any attention to higher-order processes
of ‘mediatization’), as Slater () sometimes appears to suggest. We
need these terms to grasp the wider processes of social change that result from
the increasing quantitative spread and qualitative relevance of particular
combinations of media in many particular places. But we will attempt to do so
in what follows without reproducing a ‘provincial’ () European
perspective.
A parallel from longer-term debates about
globalization may help here (). For sure, today’s everyday
experiences of ‘the global’ are at least partly based
on the massive spread of media (). But at the outset,
globalization as a process was analysed from a Western perspective, and
understood as a kind of time–space compression that had its origins in European
social institutions of modernity (). This definition of globalization as a consequence of (European)
modernity was criticized for its Western-centric bias and a provincial
time-narrative.2
Postcolonial criticism of such Western-centric approaches had been important
(), substantiated by empirical analysis of
globalization from non-Western regions of the world, especially Latin America.3 In response,
globalization research moved to an understanding of multiple ‘global
modernities’ () within ‘many globalizations’ (),
and plural ‘modernizations’ and ‘modernities’ (). Far from ‘global modernity’ being a unique ‘historical period’
(), there were forms of globalization long before
modernity. Yet it is still plausible to argue that globalization has deepened over the past few decades, in that
globalization is nowadays rooted in the everyday practices of most regions of the world (), even if the details still vary widely from context
to context.
We can make the
same points about mediatization. If we understand by mediatization the
increasing spread of communications media (quantitative) and the social and
experiential consequences of this (qualitative), both differ significantly from
one context to another and we must find a dialectical way of analysing this.
For example, the appropriation of television in Brazilian favelas ()
was highly different from that in rural India (); the same can be
said for the use of the internet by the Chinese working class () and
the middle class in suburban Malaysia (). However, one main point
remains across all the variations: that the embedding of technologically based
means of communication in the practices of everyday life is a long-term process
that deepened dramatically over the past 150 years. This is what we mean by
mediatization, and, because it is a matter of the accumulating interrelations
that derive from such embedding, it is appropriate to talk of it as becoming
‘deeper’ over time. The deepening of mediatization is a matter of the increased
reliance of all social processes on infrastructures of
communication on scales up to the global; put more broadly, it is a shift in
the modalities whereby the social world is constructed in
and across various locations.
Mediatization, then, involves a progressive increase in the complexity of
social change that derives from the increasing prevalence, among the factors
that drive social change, of factors related to underlying infrastructures of
communication.
It goes without
saying that the ways in which mediatization plays out in particular places will
depend on the particular histories of infrastructure, resources and inequality
in that place, and also on the particular human needs that media use in that
location predominantly fulfils, and this, in turn, will depend on deeper
variations in social, economic and political organization (). Which is not to say, for example, that no significance can
be attached to the increasing spread of particular platforms such as Facebook
across many countries: the common affordances of such platforms provide
starting-points for asking about how, for example, social needs get actualized
through those platforms, and how those local actualizations are available to be
connected up, practically, with actualizations elsewhere. Nor does it mean that
there are no general trends, linked for example to the coordinated development
of media markets and state actions, under way in large parts of the globe at
the same time, if in uneven ways. The growing trend towards datafication is one
such overall trend that we will discuss across many chapters.
After these
introductory remarks, it is time to turn to the three – or perhaps four – waves
of mediatization that we mentioned earlier.
Referring back to
scholars of medium theory like Harold Innis () and Marshall McLuhan
(), it became common to narrate the history of communications as phases of
the domination of a certain kind of medium that must then be understood as
having had a deep and global cultural influence. The history of humankind then
gets read as a sequence of media-dominated cultures:
‘traditional oral cultures’ are superseded by ‘scribal cultures’, followed by
‘print cultures’ and ‘global electronic cultures’ ().
This version of communications history is also widespread in sociology
(), where the differentiation
of societies is related to the ‘dissemination media’ () of
writing, printing and electronic communication.4
As already noted, this history – especially when presented as a global history
– is inadequate, because of its focus on one dominant medium and the tendency
to think in ‘communications revolutions’ () driven by certain
media-technological innovations. If we look more carefully at what changes over
time, it is not a matter of the revolutionary emergence of any one kind of
medium at particular points in history. Rather, what changes over time is the aggregate of accessible communications media, and the
role that (in their interrelations) they play in
moulding the social world. In short, what we have to focus on is the changing
media environment: the totality of communications media
available at one point in space–time. This emphasis on the media environment of
interrelating media rather than a single medium has its basis in a fundamental
point about technology in general, which is that technologies do not tend to
work in isolation, but in clusters that Brian Arthur calls ‘domains’, that is ‘mutually
supporting set[s] of technologies’ (). Media are no
different. From this perspective, it is not hard to recognize some decisive
changes in media environments across the last 600 years, and these changes are
the starting-point for a transcultural account of mediatization.
Such changes in
the media environment can be related to certain ‘surges’ or ‘waves’ of
technological innovation (). The metaphor of the ‘wave’ emphasizes, on the one hand,
certain fundamental innovations (the ‘peak of the wave’), which, on the other
hand, have long-term consequences and side-consequences (the ‘propagation’ of
the ‘wave’). This idea has a parallel in William H. Sewell’s () approach to
social transformation in which both prominent events and long-term structural
changes are of importance, and this analogy makes clear that there are multiple
ways of interpreting these waves, depending on one’s analytical perspective.
We define a wave of mediatization as a fundamental qualitative
change in media environments sufficiently decisive to constitute a distinct phase in the ongoing process of mediatization,
even when one allows for the very different forms that such media environments
may take in particular local, regional and national contexts. Underlying such
waves are fundamental technological changes in the character of media (and
media relations) that make up media environments. Our argument is not (as in medium theory) that each new media wave
results globally in a certain kind of culture and society. At most, we claim
that the starting-points for grasping social transformation,
insofar as they involve media, can change decisively from stage to stage.
Differences remain, of course, in relation to the specific context. However,
even allowing for these differences, we can trace distinct waves of
mediatization that relate to fundamental qualitative changes in the media
environment.
Looking back over
the last 600 years, we can distinguish at least three waves of mediatization (see figure 1).5 First, we have the mechanization of communications media that can be
traced back to the invention of the printing press, which was based on even
earlier forms of handling written documents (compare our analysis in Chapter 10) and was continued by
the increasing industrialization of the communication process, resulting in
what is called print mass media. Second, we have the electrification
of communications media. This started mainly with the electronic telegraph, and
ended with the various broadcast media, but also the telephone and other forms
of telecommunication. The third wave is digitalization that
can be related to the computer and the various digital media but also to the
internet, the mobile phone, and the increasing integration of computer-based
‘intelligence’ in everyday life, through all of which digital contents are
freely exchangeable.
The reason why we
can understand mechanization, electrification and digitalization as waves of
mediatization is that each of these captures a distinctive way in which the
constellation of media generally available at a particular time and place
operate as an environment – not only through upcoming ‘new’ media but also
through continuing ‘old’ media. So ‘mechanization’ does not only refer to the
book, but also to smaller kinds of media (for example, the broadsheet), and
encompasses the consequences of the typewriter for (private) letter-writing and
for the role of the handwritten manuscript. ‘Electrification’ includes various
once ‘new’ media, beginning with the telegraph and ending with radio and
television, but also transformations in the newspaper and other pre-existing
‘mechanical’ media. The same can be said for ‘digitalization’: this wave of
mediatization also concerns ‘new’ and ‘old’ media at the same time, for
example, digital television: it is even possible, as we will see, that a new
wave of datafication is under way within the wave of digitalization.
To get a deeper
understanding of the related changes we first have to consider each of these
waves in more detail, contextualizing the rather crude dates in the figure
opposite.
By mechanization we mean the wave of mediatization through
which the media environment became a mechanical one. In Europe and Northern America,
the printing press – invented in its mechanical form around 1450 by Johannes
Gutenberg – can be understood as the main origin of this process. However, we
have to bear in mind that this invention is not just a European fact: already
between 700 and 750 block printing arose in China Figure 1 and Korea, and the first experiments with
ceramic letters were undertaken around 1040 in China. Later these techniques
were developed further in Korea using bronze letters ().

The printing
press did not change the appearance and structure of the book, but rather
‘mechanized’, indeed materialized through technology, a previous shift in how
text was organized into a new form of production (). In this sense, the invention of the printing
press was less an event of a single ‘communication revolution’ () and more a ‘long revolution’
(), or, maybe better, an important step in a long-term
process of mechanization. This mechanization involved an increase in the
co-existence and co-influence of mechanically printed media with handwritten
manuscripts and other media (), but it also made a number of
‘new’ media possible: besides the printed book these were pamphlets and
broadsheets, later the newspaper (). Interestingly, these media –
mechanical or not – influenced each other in various ways. For example, printed
treatises on the art of letter-writing stimulated the handwritten letters in
early modern Europe. And for a long time manuscripts remained in use as they
offered the chance to communicate controversial issues to a wider audience,
which was embedded in practices of rewriting and ‘publish-ityourself’ ().
It would be too
crude therefore to equate the invention of the printing press with a leap into
a media environment consisting only of books and newspapers. The media
environment remained diverse and was characterized by interactions between
various media (). However,
print became fundamental for the media environment because it changed the
interrelation of other media, a change that has to be understood in a wider
context. This mechanization of the media was a specific variant of other forms
of mechanization like, for example, the invention of the mechanical clock, the
railway, and machines in factories – just to mention some important further innovations
that resulted in the ‘machine speed’ of the nineteenth century (). Therefore, we have to understand mechanization within the
overall contradictory process of industrialization ().
To understand
what such a fundamental qualitative change of the media environment meant for
the everyday, we have to look at audiences: that is, people and their media
use. If we consult historical studies, in Europe already within the seventeenth century the readership
of newspapers (and books) was quite diverse, including the aristocracy,
scholars and state officials, but also merchants, craftsmen, soldiers and women
(). While the absolute number of copies of a newspaper in
these times was a lot lower than today (between 300 and 400 copies), each copy
had between ten and thirty readers (). Media
appropriation was much more a collective venture
than an individual one. An expression of this is the foundation of various reading
clubs to share the costs of subscriptions and to have access to a wider variety
of newspapers, journals and books. Starting around the seventeenth century,
women became more and more part of the readership, and various journals and
books were dedicated especially to them, building up their own communities of
readers ().
While it is
obvious that mechanization changed media environments substantially, we must be
very cautious in attempting to deduce from this that the communicative
construction of the social world was transformed in a homogeneous way. Rather,
we can say that, with mechanization, media environments became more diverse and
complex. They involved an increasing number of different media based on the
mechanical reproduction of print: mainly broadsheets, pamphlets, books,
posters, newspapers and journals. These print media were interrelated with
non-print media. Mechanical reproduction offered through its standardized
reproduction the possibility of reaching a wider group of people via one kind
of media outlet. As a result, communication on a larger scale could ‘disembed’
() from the here and now. Hand in hand with this, new
practices of communicative construction emerged, and it is a matter of contextual
analysis to decipher these practices and to investigate under which historical
circumstances and in which contexts they are located.
Within this
plurality of possible transformations, mechanization helped to ‘thicken’ more
extensive communicative spaces by intensifying trans-local communications. In
Europe, these spaces were related historically to the rise of (national)
states, something that is reflected by the concept of the (mediated) ‘public
sphere’ (). The thickening of these
national communicative spaces supported the emergence of ‘modern societies’
() with their national ‘imagined community’ (). But it is important to remember that the late Benedict Anderson’s model
of the imagined community is just as much an account of the rise of new nations
under or against colonialism (Thailand, the Philippines), and that the nation
is only one type of imagined community made possible by print
communication (). The thickening of translocal communications can also refer to
completely different social entities: dispersed scholarly groups of experts,
religious and ethnical diasporas, or other groups with distinctive world-views,
can just as much be associated with the articulation of social conflict as the
stabilization of nation-states. In Africa for example the emergence of the
printed press was closely related to colonialism, that is, the attempt to impose a new colonial state on pre-existing societies
(). This was a long-term process and involved, on the one hand, the
construction of a ‘united “imagined community” of white settlers’ as a citizen
public and, on the other hand, the encouragement of a ‘black readership aimed
at entertainment’ () – with all its related problematic
constructions. It is here that we start to see the consequences of a
transformed media environment for larger possibilities
of social change, that is, for media’s role in the construction of social
reality itself (mediatization).
A second wave of
mediatization is electrification, which again changed the whole media
environment, and also transformed mechanical print to a higher level of
reproduction. In contrast to mechanization, electrification cannot be related
to any single important media technological innovation like print, but to
multiple ones (see figure 1), most
importantly the telegraph, telephone, gramophone, turntable and audiotape,
film, radio and television. By the term ‘electrification’, we mean the
transformation of communications media into technologies and infrastructures
based on electronic transmission. In electrification, media of various sorts
became increasingly embedded in wider technological networks: in electricity
grids, cable networks, networks of directional radio, and so on. This move is
also a further step of interrelating media closer with
each other, and so increasing the interdependences within the media
environment.
The electric
telegraph was invented in the 1830s. After the 1850s an intense wiring of the
world began, starting from London and Paris, and having a first peak with the
successful transatlantic submarine cable in 1866 ().
However, this infrastructure of electric communication was far from
egalitarian, centred first in the UK and later the USA, and in the hands of a
limited number of companies funded by capital from particular investor
countries (). The basic technologies of the telephone go
back to the nineteenth century, and already in the 1920s long-distance calls
became possible. The development of wireless telephone technology – radio telephony –
began at the end of the nineteenth century (), with the
first mobile train phones in Europe in 1926 and first mobile car phones in
North America in 1946.
If we consider
electric telegraphy and telephony, the striking fact is that electrification
was in the beginning predominantly related to what is called ‘personal
communication’ and not to ‘mass communication’ (). Initially, the
benefits went to selected elite groups, especially in the fields of the
military, economy and government (). In addition, the
electric telegraph transformed print journalism as it made possible quicker
access to transnational and transcultural information, which became first
important for war coverage ().
Electrification
involved incremental moves from mechanization, through partly electrified
media, to fully electronic media. This becomes apparent if we refer to audio
communication, where we have a sequence of innovations like the gramophone,
turntable and audiotape. While the phonograph and gramophone were mechanical,
the turntable was an electronic audio device for producing sound from the combination
of phonograph and record. Audiotapes followed in the second half of the 1920s,
as commercial products in the mid 1930s, again with many mechanical parts. In
visual communication, we once again notice electrification on the basis of a
sophisticated mechanization. Photography in the 1830s was a
mechanical-chemical procedure; its electrification started in the 1950s through
the use of electric parts in cameras. In a much faster way, film production
also moved into electrification. Being in the beginning a mechanical-chemical
medium like photography, the projection of films in cinemas made strong lights
necessary as well as electric motors to drive the film reels. A further step
into electrification was sound films. Over time, we have come to consider film
as an electronic medium.
Typically,
however, electrification is thought of in terms of broadcast media, that is,
radio and television. Developed as technologies at the end of the nineteenth
century, the first radio broadcast took place in 1906. However, not before the
end of the First World War and the beginning of the 1920s did radio become a
more widespread medium. In the beginning the medium was technically open for a
mutual transmission of private messages; this fascinated Bertolt Brecht, for
instance, who was interested in its capacity as a horizontal ‘communication
system’ (). Driven, however, by commercial and political
interests it quickly became sender-centred, being legally regulated and
technically materialized as broadcasting
(). Already by the 1920s
and 1930s, radio was established in Europe, North and South America, and also
in Asian and later African countries (). Television
goes back to a late nineteenth-century vision of making the transmission of
(moving) pictures by telegraph possible (), but
regular television broadcasting did not start until the mid 1930s in Germany,
the UK and the USA (). The main breakthrough of
television happened in the late 1940s in the USA, and in the 1950s and 1960s in
Europe and many other parts of the world. Television changed its character
continuously, becoming in the 1970s a coloured medium with increasingly new and
original formats, additional related devices (remote control, VCR), and the
spread of satellite television across borders in the 1970s and 1980s ().
These historical
moments demonstrate again how by electrification the whole media environment
became transformed. ‘New’ media emerged, but also ‘older’ media like the press
underwent change, too. Electrification was the trigger for a deep qualitative
change of the whole media environment within a rapid sequence of media
technological innovations, perhaps having its first peak at the beginning of
the twentieth century – a time in which contemporaries already imagined a
‘wireless age’ (). Across the world, electrification was an
enormous endeavour, with high public and private investments being necessary to
build up the appropriate technical infrastructure, first by landline and
cross-Atlantic telegraphy cables, later by broadcasting stations and cable
networks.
Electrification can
nonetheless be seen – at least in its beginning – as an extension of
mechanization, but with the key difference that it involved a deeper interlinking of media through a new technological
infrastructure: the electricity grid, cable and broadcasting networks etc.
Single media came to appear less ‘independent’; increasingly, technical
capacity was not only on the producers’ side of the media, but also on the
users’ side. Therefore, at a fundamental level electrification can be
understood as a move into a deeper, and technically more intertwined, media
environment.
How should we
understand the social and cultural consequences of electrification? We must
again be very careful not to oversimplify the related social and cultural
transformations around the globe. It is too crude to run together all forms of
technical connectivity by assuming they had a single global consequence (). It would be too
reductionist also to assume that electrification of media caused something like
a ‘global neighbourhood’ (). However, proceeding in a
more open way, we can notice at least three interdependencies involved in
electrification, as it came to shape the media environment.
First, with
reference to all kinds of produced media communication, electrification made
possible simultaneous transmission of media content across
space. Crucial here was the emergence of powerful media organizations in the
film, but especially broadcasting, industries. The connectivity they enabled
through their production cycles generated shared rhythms of
simultaneous experience and new narratives of commonality, whose clearest form
was the ‘media event’ in which there emerged the ‘rare realization of the full
potential of electronic media technology’ ().
Second,
electrical transmission made new forms of near-instantaneous, reciprocal
communication feasible across long distances: the new possibility of simultaneity in personal communication across space.
Various media like telegraph, telephone etc., some of which were widespread
before the electronic mass media, support this. As a consequence, this wave of
mediatization is not only related to the emergence of new types of media organizations, but in addition and much more
far reaching it made possible completely new kinds of social institutions. For example, already with
telegraphy in the 1860s, a globalized economy began to emerge, when ‘the first
tickers clicked out stock prices’ ().
Third, these
forms of communication offered possibilities for constructing cultures in new
ways across space and time. Electrification brought media that supported a
further thickening of translocal spaces of communication. It was a wider support
for stabilizing national communicative spaces and at the same time for a
possible social and cultural differentiation within and across those spaces
then, for example among diasporas: that is, transnationally dispersed cultural
groups which maintain their relations in real time through electronic media
(). But this is only one example of a broader possibility: the
establishment, through structures of simultaneity and shared rhythms of media
flow, of translocally configured cultures of many sorts, including at the most
general level the emergence of large-scale popular culture since the 1950s.
We are not, of
course, saying that electrified media environments were, or are, the same
across the world and would have resulted in one kind of global change at the
social and cultural level. Other dynamics took place in Nigeria, for example,
where videocassettes and the infrastructure of privacy had an important role
for building up counter-spaces and alternative collectivities (). In general, ‘indigenous media’ () supported a range
of possible dynamics and consequences: coming together through media as a
collectivity, constructing shared memories through media, and gaining a ‘voice’
in public discourse. In Latin America, there has been a ‘hybrid history’
() of appropriating technologically based media of
communication: beyond a linear ‘Western’ modernization this has supported
processes of transculturation, especially in urban areas. These media
environments made possible not just nationalized but also highly de-centred and
globalized processes of communicative construction, each of which must be
analysed contextually.
Digitalization is
the third wave of mediatization within the last few centuries, and is typically
related to the computer, internet and mobile phone.6 All three are key inventions for this wave
of mediatization, but again we should be reserved about describing them as
‘revolutions’ (): like all other inventions,
they are the result of complex distributed social processes of making. One
perspective on this history sees algorithms and software as the fundamental
level of digital media;7
another emphasizes the perspective of politics in the history of digitalization;8 while a third brings
out the cultural contexts and ‘pioneering’ groups behind these developments.9 However, we want to
start our analysis by moving the development of ‘the internet’ itself into the
foreground. As we emphasized earlier, a main characteristic of waves of
mediatization is the intensified interrelatedness
between media that they involve: the internet is the
infrastructure that makes possible the linkages between contemporary media
devices with mainframe computers, large data centres, and – in the near future
– social robots and autonomous systems like self-driving cars, as well as links
all our activities on countless digital platforms.
The history of
‘the internet’ has been told many times. Everyone knows that it emerged from
the research arm of the USA’s military establishment through its connections
with university research labs. In this sense, it is a strong example of how
developments for which ‘the market’ claims ultimate credit usually derive from
deep underlying subsidies by the state and other forms of public institution
(). Particularly important is the combination of steps – some
state-led, some driven by markets – as a result of which in 2015 a small number
of corporations that loosely can still be called ‘media’ – Google, Facebook,
Apple, Instagram, perhaps
also Twitter and, in China, Alibaba – can through their ‘platforms’ act directly on the world of consumption and the world of
everyday social interaction. The stages involved in that development are worth
setting out more fully.10
First, there was
the building of ‘distributed’ networks of communications between (initially
very few) computers through the innovative process of ‘packet switching’, as a
means, initially, to ensure more secure forms of communication when facing
military attack (). The
next stage was the development () of the TCP/IP protocol11
for connecting up groups of already linked computers into a wider network,
originally implemented in the early 1980s, and leading by 1989 to an ‘internet’
of around 160,000 computers in the public sector. The defining stage was the
emergence of the World Wide Web, which occurred through two key inventions: the
idea that texts could be linked together if they were associated with ordered
sets of ‘metadata’ called ‘hypertext’, and CERN’s Tim Berners-Lee’s
formalization of the means to ensure the reliable transmission of hypertext
between linked computers (HTML, or Hypertext Markup Language; HTTP, or the
Hypertext Transfer Protocol; and URL, or Universal Resource Locator, which
provided an address code for each hypertext file). Taken together, they enabled
the proposal in 1990 for a ‘web’ of files on networked computers and the first
system for ‘browsing’ the domain of those texts (the World Wide Web), and the
first ‘web’ site in November 1991 (info.cern.ch). This publicly subsidized
development had produced by the early 1990s the skeleton of a connective
infrastructure, but this was not yet linked to everyday commercial activity, or
even non-specialist everyday use.
A rather
different and accelerated sequence generated the deeply commercialized internet
and WWW that we know in the second decade of the twenty-first century. In 1991,
NSFNET was closed and the internet’s operations handed over by the US
government to commercial providers. From this new starting-point, the first
commercial web browser (MOSAIC) was developed by a researcher, Marc Andreesen,
who had left the public research sector (the NCSA, or US National Centre for
Supercomputing Applications) to found his own commercial company called
Netscape Communications, which went on to produce and mass-market Netscape. In
the late 1990s and early 2000s, the means to access the exponentially growing
domain of internet-linked files shifted from the model of managed directories
(Yahoo) to Google’s algorithmically based model of indexing pages based on a hierarchy developed
from, at its most basic, counting the number of links in to each
internet page. The distinctiveness of Google was that, rather than process a
bounded and finite directory, its operations were, in a technical sense,
recursive, with each new link increasing the data over which its calculations
ranged, and increasing the mechanism’s power, without end. This key innovation
facilitated internet use considerably, and emerged alongside the diffusion of
small desktop computers and then laptops as means for accessing the internet
easily.
Building on the
huge success of its Google search engine, Google bolted onto it the foundations
of a much more robust commercial infrastructure: a new model for advertising
tied to terms searched through the Google search engine (‘Google Adwords’) and
a system of live-auction advertising (Adsense), which together opened up a new
basis for the marketization of online ‘space’.
The crucial next
step was the independent development of ‘smart’ mobile phones with the capacity
not just to provide access to the traditional modalities of phone use
(talking/listening, plus the key discovery of the mobile phone device: the
sending and receiving of text, or SMS), but also to the domain of the World
Wide Web. The emergence of ‘smart’ phones was followed relatively quickly by
the design (led by Apple, but quickly followed by most other smartphone
providers) of applications, or ‘apps’, installable on each phone, to provide
accelerated and simplified access to particular domains of web data. A further
crucial step involved the emergence () of a new type of website which provided platforms for hundreds of
millions of users to network with each other, but within the parameters of form
and content management designed by that platform’s owners: so-called ‘social
media networks’. This is the twenty-first-century replaying of the emergence of
possibilities for lateral communications which Craig Calhoun ()
noticed in the history of nineteenth-century communications, but this time
harnessed to the capacity for every message, in principle, to be directed at,
or subsequently re-circulated to, the whole domain of the WWW through acts of
‘mass self-communication’ ().
The result of
these cumulative and interlocking steps is a strikingly complete transformation
of ‘the internet’ from a closed, publicly funded and publicly oriented network
for specialist communication into a deeply commercialized, increasingly banal space for the conduct of social life itself. The sheer
size of the data transmissions now occurring via the internet has generated
entirely unprecedented infrastructural demands (especially for storage, but
also to support data processing) that are being satisfied, once more, not by public interests, but by a
small number of private corporations that dominate the so-called ‘cloud’
().
Again, the wave
of digitalization was not only a matter of so-called ‘new’ media. ‘Old’ print
and electronic media also became more and more digital. This is very well
documented for print, especially the book and newspaper industry (). Indeed, television and film
also became digital, from the perspectives of both production and use, most
recently with internet television, second screens and digital film projectors.
As digital products they could be pirated and reached further audiences and
users across the globe who build ‘underground networks driving globalization
from below’ (). Related to digitalization is also a
fundamental shift in the business models of media derived, in part, from shifts
in how advertisers can reach their target audiences, that is, increasingly
through personalized tracking of individuals and related data collection
(). Another emerging trend is the increasing embedding of digital
media capacities in objects that accompany everyday practices: ‘virtualized
media communication’, such as computer and mobile phone ‘assistants’ simulating
a living communication partner, or ‘social robots’ as ‘artificial companions’
in our lives (), something that more and more becomes
realized through software ().
How should we
understand the cultural and social consequences of these changes? It is
certainly not enough to talk, as we often do, of media saturation, of even
supersaturation (). The saturated
nature of the media environment was already being noted back in 2003, that is,
towards the beginning of the wave of digitalization, and long before its peak
(). Some writers have sought to accentuate the abruptness of
the digital transition, arguing that the new capacities of receivers of
communication to send communications from the same device, and often as part of
the same communication cycle, have led to the disappearance of the ‘person
formerly known as the audience’ (), or the emergence of the hybrid
‘produser’ (). Undoubtedly, the starting possibilities for our
relations to media have changed, but it is unhelpful to read the resulting
forms and patterns of use in too polarized a way. Audiences are able to do an
extended range of things with media (): for example, their
commentary on media is now available to be folded back into production cycles
in ways that were previously impossible. But media produced by media
organizations have not disappeared, and today’s forms of media saturation are
only an intensification (driven by the capacities of mobile phones and social media networks) of – not a
fundamental break from – cultural forms that emerged late in the wave of
electrification with the late 1990s growth of reality media and celebrity
culture in many parts of the world (from Brazil to Korea, from Lebanon to South
Africa).
We would do
better to look for change at the level of the increasingly individualized
patterns through which people can access, follow and comment upon
(in other words, ‘actualize’) what we propose to call the media manifold
(defined shortly). As yet, we do not know much about those figurations, except
that they are much more varied than were possible in the electronic wave of
mediatization, when most media content came from a limited number of
synchronized central sources, when opportunities for media production were very
limited and tied to the operations and gatekeeping power of those central
resources, and when commentary on media was almost always lost to the air.
Put more
generally, digitalization involves a further deepening, both in the connectedness of the infrastructures on which
media-related practice depends – so, for example, the digital is now dependent
on the development of Wi-Fi and other mobile services – and in the layering of connected media practices in which
individuals or groups are now routinely engaged. Media environments have become
characterized increasingly by ‘convergence’ (),12 meaning less a
merger of all media devices into one kind of super-device, and more convergence
at the level of the ‘data’ or content which, being digital, becomes communicable across multiple devices, some new, some
older.
Living in the
midst of this third wave of mediatization, it is obvious that it has
far-reaching consequences for the communicative construction of the social
world. But it must be understood merely as the provisional climax
of this latest wave of deep mediatization. We now see signs of a further wave of mediatization, a wave that is related
to data. If we consider how far datafication changes the way we produce
knowledge (see Chapter 7), how
deeply it is related to the constitution of the self, of collectivities and
organizations (see Chapters 8, 9, 10), these media-related changes may well be more
far-reaching than those we currently associate with digitalization. Certainly,
we can expect a further deepening of the relations of interdependence between
media and between people, when an increasing proportion of communication relies
on infrastructures of communication based on the collection and processing of
data. The degree to which this is the harbinger of a further qualitative shift
of the whole media environment must remain, in part, an open question, but one
to which we will return at various points in the chapters that follow.
Mediatization
came in waves – mechanization, electrification, digitalization – which each
changed the whole media environment fundamentally. But since it is the whole
media environment we are talking about, such mediatization waves cannot be
understood as the ‘diffusion’ () of one dominant medium,
and it is much too crude to say that we have always lived in a newspaper,
television or internet/mobile phone era. To understand mediatization, we must
understand it as a process of the increasing deepening of technology-based interdependence. This deepening has
two senses; first, that over the past 600 years an acceleration of
technological innovations in media has taken place; and second that, over the
same period, media have become increasingly relevant to articulating the kind of cultures and societies we live in, because of media’s changing role in the conditions of
human interdependence.
Acceleration of
change means in a basic sense that the sequence of more or less fundamental
technological innovations in the field of communications becomes shorter. While
for example the interval between the invention of the printing press and the
printed newspaper was around 150 years, telephone, film, radio and television
were invented within fifty years, and the innovation of various digital media took
place within thirty years. In a more complex way, comparing the three waves of
mediatization – mechanization, electrification and digitalization – the change
of the whole media environment in which they resulted took place in
increasingly short time-periods, linked to the increasing causal weight of pre-existing media in shaping the new interconnected
media environment that emerged. Both can be related to a more general
phenomenon: what Hartmut Rosa has called the ‘progressive acceleration of
social change’ (). If we recall innovations in media
technologies presented in the earlier figure, we can follow Rosa’s proposal of
a transformation ‘from an intergenerational
speed of change in early modernity through a phase of approximate synchronization
with the sequence of generations in “classical modernity” to a tendency toward
an intragenerational tempo in late modernity’ (). But once again, we should avoid tying this acceleration automatically
to ‘European’ modernization: with that caveat, Rosa’s metaphor may help us to
grasp the acceleration of media’s role in processes of globalization
themselves.
Such cumulated
waves of mediatization have resulted in a media environment that is unique in
its present form: many communications media – even the stone tablet and
manuscript – have not disappeared but kept a special functional role, partly within the arts.
Some early electronic media, like vinyl records for example, even have a
revival (). Beside that, a further landscape of digital media has
been established – the mobile phone, online platforms and computer games are
just some examples – while older electronic media such as the television, radio
or cinema themselves became digital; all of this in a sustained and ever more
distributed infrastructure. There remains, however, a significant challenge in
grasping the complexity of the contemporary media environment adequately.
Underlying these
changes has been a deeper change, that media’s degree of technical interrelatedness has considerably increased
from mechanization to electrification, and then again from electrification to
digitalization. The technical interrelatedness of mechanization was limited
insofar as technology was mainly used on the side of media production and far
less on the side of media use. Think of the printing press: the distribution of
printed books, magazines and broadsheets took place through physical mobility,
and the use of these print media did not involve any use
technology at all. This changed with electronic media: media became
technologically intertwined, with the wider power grid of electricity
distribution being a precondition for electronic media’s subsequent
distribution, and media themselves becoming dependent on their own
technological infrastructure, including broadcasting networks, cable networks,
radio networks etc. This technological relatedness partly became manifested in
new kinds of devices that integrated various ‘different’ media into one
terminal, like for example ‘compact systems’ combining radio, audio cassette,
records and sometimes even television into one end-device at the user’s side.
In the broadest sense, digitalization has been a further move in the direction
of technological interrelatedness:13
through digitalization, it became possible to move various kinds of ‘content’
across a connective infrastructure, the internet. In turn, our devices for
accessing the internet may no longer be specialist computers, but can be
multi-purpose devices such as smartphones and tablets. Even so, while in such a
media environment most devices are based on aspects of computer technology, we
do not yet have a convergence into one ‘meta-device’.14 What we have instead
is a deep technical interrelatedness of the increasing variety
of different devices; this is what makes connectivity so omnipresent as a
requirement of our present times. In addition to this, the character of each
medium is more and more defined by the particular software and calculative
functions on which its underlying functions are based, and not just by the
technological device as such. What we call a ‘mobile phone’ is a device that
can ‘represent’ to us multiple media, and can even be extended by adding further
apps that give filtered access to other media streams.
The resulting increased interrelatedness of contemporary digital
media cannot just be considered as a question of choice: which medium an
individual selects for what purpose. The deepened interrelatedness associated
with the wave of digitalization defines a new kind of media
environment different from earlier media environments. We need therefore to
develop the right analytic tools to grasp what is distinctive about this
environment, and our relations to it.
As the wave of
digitalization has proceeded, various kinds of description have been proposed
to capture the new types of interrelation that have been emerging. Some terms
put emphasis on the interchanges of content between various media; for example,
‘remediation’ (the ‘representation of one medium in another’ (), ‘transmediality’ (), and ‘spreadable media’ of ‘viral’ communications
across various platforms (). Other concepts
foreground the appropriations of multiple media by users: the terms ‘cross-media’
(), ‘media repertoires’
() and ‘polymedia’ () are examples of this. Such a terminology understands the
contemporary media landscape as a ‘composite environment within which each
medium [and its use] is defined relationally to all other media’ (): ‘media repertoires’ are not just a sum of the media a person
uses but the meaningful relation between them in everyday practice. Deep
mediatization on this view is marked by user practices that move across a
variety of media.
Such concepts
hint at the fundamental transformation of the social world that flows from deep
mediatization and they are correct in trying to grasp the relations of
interdependence that characterize the digital media environment. However, they
do not capture the interrelated complexity that is
characteristic of the digitalized media environment as a whole. To capture
this, we offer the concept of the media manifold.15
The term
‘manifold’ comes from mathematics, specifically topology, where it refers to a
topological space in many dimensions that can be adequately described by a
shape in a lesser-dimensional (for example, Euclidian) space. So the earth is a
three-dimensional shape that can, with reasonable fidelity, be reduced to a set
of two-dimensional ‘maps’ of parts of its surface. Deleuze used this notion to
emphasize the open-ended complexity of the world, but his emphasis was rather
on how that order escapes any simple reduction to a model
(). The Deleuzian usage however seems to lose touch
with the two-level aspect of the manifold concept that, we would
argue, is most useful in grasping how we stand now with media: that is, the relation between a many-dimensional object and the
approximation to that object in another object with fewer dimensions.
Our suggestion is
that this double concept (the ‘manifold’) well captures the doubleness of our
embedding in today’s extremely complex media environment. The set of media and
information possibilities on which a typical social actor, at least in rich
countries, can now draw is almost infinite, and organized on very many
dimensions. But it is in fact a reduced set of possibilities from which we
choose every day: that reduced set is how, in practice, we actualize, for daily
usage, that many-dimensional media universe.16
What we then do with media on particular occasions actualizes, in turn, that
reduced selection, and comprises itself a distinct and important level of
variation. There are therefore three levels in operation; but here, as we try
to understand our relations as social actors to the wider universe of media, it
is only the first two levels (and their interrelations) that most concern us.
The relation between this reduced set of daily options and
the infinity of options in principle available is what we mean when we talk of
our relations with a ‘media manifold’, holding onto the
idea of ‘manifold’ as a many-dimensional object that can be captured adequately
in a lesser number of dimensions.
The term ‘media
manifold’ enables us to keep in view both the social actor’s position within a
much larger institutionalized environment of interdependent media and the situated complexity of that actor’s everyday
choices of media. We need to understand both, and their interrelations, since
the dynamics of that wider environment, particularly its overriding pressures
towards datafication, are of major consequences for all actors and for the
organization of social life as a whole.17
In the next
chapter we turn to how we can think sociologically about the consequences of
our relations with today’s very complex media environment for the construction
of the social world.
Especially the new ‘media archaeology’ (). Compare for this argument Appadurai, 1996;
Chakrabarty, 2001; Fabian, 1983; Nederveen Pieterse, 1995. For an analysis of this, see García Canclini, 1995;
Murphy and Rodríguez, 2006; Straubhaar, 2007; Waisbord, 2013a. Luhmann also discusses the role of symbolically
generalized ‘success media’ like, for example, money for the development of
what he calls functional systems of society (). As
technological media of communications are the focus of our analysis we do not
focus on this argument in the following. We develop here an idea by Klaus Merten () to
visualize the ‘evolution of communication’ while we do not share his narrow and
functionalist interpretation. Our argument has at this point a certain parallel to
Finnemann’s () reflections
that mediatization has to do with technologically driven changes across all
epochs; compare on this also Lammers and Jackson, 2014, p. 34. An excellent example of such an approach is Lev
Manovich’s book on software as ‘the engine of contemporary societies’
(). See Barbrook () on how politics influenced the
‘imaginary futures’ of the emerging computer era. See Turner () on the move from counterculture to
cyberculture. Thanks to Andrew Keen’s recent book (),
which, though polemical, sets out these key stages with unusual sharpness.
There were alternative protocols, but TCP/IP won
out (). It is worth noting however that media forms such as
cinema have, to a significant degree, always been converged with other
ancillary media (). This was anticipated by Marshall McLuhan (). As noted already by Henry Jenkins ().
First suggested in Couldry (); see also
Couldry, 2012, pp. 16–17 and 44. In September 2015 the Swedish-based company
Shortcut Labs announced the development of a device to help us select from the
increasing proliferation of apps, an app for apps, as it were: Guardian 7 September, p. 26. In developing the concept of media manifold, we
acknowledge the usefulness of the widespread idea of media’s ‘affordances’
(). While helpful in considering interrelations with
a specific medium, however, it is less useful here, since, in daily practice,
in the media manifold new types of ‘affordances’ continuously overlap and
conflict with each other, obscuring the broader relations in which we are
interested.
We have in the
previous chapter argued that our complex media environment is best described as
a media manifold. Such complexity can, perhaps, be seen as characteristic of
social practice in general: Theodor Schatzki, the leading exponent of practice
theory, writes of ‘the manifolds of linked doings and sayings that compose
practices’ (). But the term ‘media manifold’
refers to a degree of institutionalized interdependence
in everyday practices with media that creates a distinctive type of social complexity. How do we live with this
complexity? What does this complexity mean for us? Posing this question brings
us to recent social science debates about the relationship between technology,
systems and complexity, and requires us to develop and extend a further concept
from social theory, that of ‘figurations’. The result is an approach to
‘society’ itself that is not functionalist, yet it registers the ordering force of the interdependent
institutional arrangements that we call ‘media’ and in which our lives are
implicated.
This chapter will
take further the conceptual innovations on which our overall argument relies.
Our task will be twofold: first, within the broader context of recent social
science thought about complexity, to insist that the two most popular options
for thinking about interdependence (‘networks’ and ‘assemblage’) are, in spite
of some virtues, inadequate for understanding the distinctive processes of
institutionalization characteristic of social life under conditions of deep
mediatization. We then take on the challenge of developing Elias’ concept of
figuration, which remains relatively underdeveloped, into an analytic tool that
can help us grasp many levels of complexity in a social life whose every
element and layer depends on linked processes of mediated communication: that,
in turn, requires further conceptual innovation, involving the extended concept
of ‘figurations of figurations’. This will be hard work,
but it is necessary to complete the foundations of our larger argument.
However, before
we come to this overall argument, we have to reflect on the deeply
interconnected nature of infrastructures and organizational processes today, which inevitably
encourages some idea that the social world is a complex
technologically driven ‘system’ dispersed across space, or rather many
interlinked technological systems. Indeed, without some notion of systematicity
(), how could we understand the claims to a system
made, for example, by powerful actors such as governments, platform operators,
or infrastructure owners? But acknowledging the force of pressures towards a
system is very different from saying that we have a clear grasp already of what
the phrase ‘technological system’ might mean in a social context, or that
‘system’ concepts from mathematics and the physical sciences are necessarily a
helpful starting-point.
Some have seen
the rise of time–space measurement and signalling systems based on GPS as an
example of complexity in social life. Should we rethink how we are ‘in the
world’ in terms of a ‘converged locatedness’ which relies entirely on
distributed technological systems that gather, process and transmit information
()? The surveillance mechanisms routinely embedded in
particular types of work – such as online trading – have been another source of
‘complexity’ theorizing (). Complexity theory has been readily
adapted in management theory as a way of grasping the operations and flow of
large organizations (). Meanwhile, in sociology, one highly
developed theory of the social has been built on the notion of hierarchical
relations between multiple self-sustaining systems: Niklas Luhmann’s ()
systems theory, which drew heavily on the early work on biological systems by
Varela.1
But two basic
problems arise with such theorizing. First, they depend on metaphor, as even
enthusiasts of complexity theory acknowledge (). The
social world is not composed of elements whose
interactions can be measured and analysed numerically, and this flows directly
from the nature of the social world: each of its actors not only acts but interprets, and those processes of interpretation are
themselves often complex, creating ‘complexities of complexities’ (). For that reason, all applications to the social world of
complexity theory from the physical sciences or mathematics depend on a
decision to apply such theory metaphorically in a
social context for which it was not designed (). Second, the
choice of interpreting the complex social world as system is already
arbitrary. Consider the assumption in Luhmann’s work that the social system,
whatever its complex interlinked nature, is self-adjusting and generally in
equilibrium; or (even stranger) the assumption by Luhmann-follower Qvortrup
that the (primary) role of the institutions we have known as ‘media’ is not to
make profit, or tell stories, or provide employment, but instead to ‘manage
social complexity’ (). What would count as evidence for such claims? Why believe that
the social world is comprised of large-scale ‘components’ that have come to
interrelate seamlessly together in terms of certain ‘basic functions’? This
approach to the understanding of the social world reads order backwards into emergent processes, and so misreads
historically produced differentiation as functionally derived differentiation;
it also assumes the boundedness of systems that may in fact be overlapping
().
A different problem
arises with attempts to talk about the social world in terms of ‘topology’.
Topology is the field of mathematics that concerns the properties of
geometrical shapes that remain invariant under
various transformations (stretching, twisting, and so on). Topology is
interested in how different shapes, however unrecognizably we transform them,
can remain the same (and so distinct from other topological shapes) in certain
fundamental respects. Confusingly, however, the notion of topology has been
adopted in social science as a stand-in for fluidity, not invariance. For sure,
a sense of the overwhelming complexity of rapid transformation generates
something like a topological question about
whether, for example, globalization has really changed ‘the very ontology of
place and territoriality’ (). But so-called ‘topological
thinking’ in the social sciences, instead of explaining what might be gained by
thinking of enduring invariances as topological forms,
uses ‘topology’ as a byword for fluidity (), exactly missing the point of ‘topology’
itself (). ‘Topology’ can only help us understand
a world outside mathematics if there is a ‘technical translation’ or
‘functional mapping’ between a domain of ‘mathematical activity’ and ‘social or
cultural activity’ (): that requires further work, which
goes beyond the scope of this book.
We need
alternative understandings of the complexity of our contemporary life with
media that do not work through metaphor, but focus on the core concerns of
social theory. As early as the 1970s the sociologist Norbert Elias built a
social theory for describing an increasingly complex social world that did not
reduce it to functional description or pure metaphor. He understood the social
world through its increasingly complex ways of interweaving human beings in relations of interdependence that he called
‘figurations’. Or as Elias puts it: ‘the indices of complexity set out here may
perhaps help to make everyday matters appear rather strange. This is necessary
if one is to understand why sociology’s field of investigation – the processes
and structures of interweaving, the figurations formed by the actions of interdependent people, in
short, societies – is a problem at all’ ().
For sure, Elias’
theory requires some development if it is to be adequate to describe the
complexity of our contemporary life with media. However, Elias was already
sensitive to how the complexity of figurations might increase with media’s
expansion (). We want to develop in this chapter a figurational approach to describe our life with media.
But first we need briefly to survey two rival concepts for understanding
complexity – network and assemblage – that, in spite of their usefulness, fall
short of grasping how the social world is built, in part, out of accumulated
relations of meaning.
Network and
assemblage are both concepts for capturing complex structural relations. Both
assume some notion of how the social world holds together in a
regular and ordered way. The idea of analysing networks goes back many decades
and has generated an important branch of social science methodology. Assemblage
derives from philosophy and has become an important approach in wider cultural
analysis. Each approach has crucial limits.
Network is a
structural metaphor to describe the relations of human actors within a certain
social entity (group, family, etc.) and in between such entities. Network
research developed long before the internet and contemporary processes of deep
mediatization.2 But, during the wave
of digitalization, network analysis became increasingly a dominant analytical perspective. Already in the 1990s
Barry Wellman () sought to apply the concept of network to understand how
‘electronic groups’ operate: as the intensity of the internet’s connective
infrastructure developed, so too did the notions of ‘networked individualism’
() and the possibility of conceiving the social
itself as based on a new ‘operating system’ (). On this
view, society appears as nothing more than a large, complex network: ‘societies
– like computer systems – have networked structures that provide opportunities
and constraints, rules and procedures’ ().
Manuel Castells’
() idea of the network society is more far-reaching, as he is
concerned with power-relations that operate on all scales up to the global.
Networks for Castells are ‘complex structures of communication’ () that are transformed, as media technologies themselves change,
making possible what he calls ‘mass self-communication’ (), as
individuals increasingly, if very unevenly, have access to the ‘broadcasting’
capacity that previously was reserved to institutions. More recent work has
developed the concept of network further (), distinguishing between networks
where many modalities operate across the same node (‘multi-modal, uniplex
networks’) and networks in which multiple relations (of the same sort) reach
out from a single object (‘unimodal, multiplex networks’).
All such
approaches to network analysis contribute something valuable to our overall
understanding of how the social world is constructed, because they map the
changing dynamics of ‘actor constellations’ () as social
structures – what Simmel () called Wechselwirkungen
of individuals – as a fundamental unit of social structure. Media uses are
clearly crucial for such networking dynamics ().
The problem of
‘network’ as a concept is that it reduces the social world to nothing more than the actor-constellations of networks.
In so doing, many further features of the social world and our life within it
are ignored. Try as they might to acknowledge the importance also of the
‘production of meaning’ in communication networks () or
the ‘stories’ that ‘mark ties within networks’ (), leading
network theorists are unable to integrate these processes of meaning into their
overall picture of how the social world is constructed. In addition, notions of
‘network society’ are still reifying networks as
entities that can simply be positioned against other social
groups,3 without considering
the full complexity of the contextualized relations of interdependence in which
both networks and groups are embedded. The concept of ‘network’ always falls
short therefore of understanding the overall
constructions of meaning that orientate human
action.
By contrast, the
term ‘assemblage’ was developed first in the arts to describe collages, and
more recently has acquired a rich philosophical trajectory that captures
‘wholes’ characterized by relations of exteriority (). In French the word is not ‘assemblage’ but ‘agencement’, meaning
‘arrangement’ or ‘fitting’ like the arrangement of the parts of a body (or
machine) or the fitting of two or more parts together (). In the social sciences, ‘social assemblage’ has come to
refer to a ‘set of human bodies properly oriented (physically or
psychologically) towards each other’ (), but without any
assumption that they form a natural or functional unity. From here, some argue
the social world consists of various, differently scaled assemblages (), and we sympathize with this anti-functionalist line of thinking.
Particularly popular has been the use of the term ‘assemblages’ to attribute to
‘non-human’ objects an agency of their own that unfolds in an assemblage with
acting humans (), which connects with other scholarly work
in the tradition of ‘socio-technical co-production’ and ‘socio-materiality’.4 Indeed, the
anti-functionalist emphasis of work on ‘assemblages’ is well suited to help us
to grasp the contribution of many heterogeneous elements in the contingent
historical arrangements that we have come to call ‘media’ (). The term ‘assemblage’ is valuable, because it helps us grasp the
variety of ways in which communicative practices (of every sort) are today deeply interwoven with media technologies (of every
sort), and we will draw on it in later chapters.
Yet again there
are some weaknesses of this term. First, it is often used in a rather
metaphorical way to describe just the fact that different things and practices
‘come together’ in a field of interest: but, in itself, that tells us little
about the type of ‘coming together’ involved, and the varying forms of order at
work. Second, and even less helpful, much writing about assemblages involves
the claim that the ‘ontology’ of assemblages is flat: that is, ‘it contains
nothing but differently scaled individual singularities’ (). In other words, there is nothing ‘behind’ social aggregates, only endless
‘reassembling’ (). However, such an analysis closes off
many important questions. Can we grasp the (mediated) construction of the social
world just by considering the ‘assembling’ of practices and things in a ‘flat
landscape’? Are there not forms of structural relatedness that have
consequences beyond the particular assemblage itself? And when material objects
are arranged in ways that help stabilize social processes, are the arrangements
all the same?
Missing from both
concepts (network and assemblage) is an attention to the complexity of our
changing interrelations and interactions through communications, and
specifically mediated communications. The strength of ‘network’ is the
attention to the structural features of actor constellations, whereas the
strength of ‘assemblage’ is its attention to the fine detail of practice and
its entanglement with material technologies. But neither concept discusses
comprehensively how complexity is built up in and through
processes of meaning-construction and resource-distribution.
Throughout this
book, we understand the social world as the space of interrelatedness
that involves and encompasses a particular set of actors (however large): as
such, it must be more than the sum of its networks and assemblages. Nor can it
be flat, in the sense of without structure or hierarchy.5
Let us then move beyond network and assemblage to
explore a different concept for grasping our life within the complexity of the
media manifold: the concept of figurations.
The idea behind
the term ‘figurations’ for Elias was to critique ‘reifying ways of speaking’
() about the social world: by the 1970s, it had become usual
to describe social phenomena, such as families, groups or organizations, as if
they were objects ‘beyond’ the individual, positioning the social ‘against’ the
individual, and understanding social phenomena as static, not dynamic and
processual. Yet there is no social world ‘over and above’ the interrelations of
individuals, and no individual is understandable outside her/his embedding in
the social world (). This is why we must think
about social entities as figurations that are
formed, and reformed, in an open-ended process.
At its most
basic, figuration is ‘a simple conceptual tool’ () to allow
a thinking in which ‘the individual’ and ‘society’ are not treated as
antagonistic. A figuration is a kind of ‘mode[l] of processes of interweaving’
(), a more or less stable interaction of individuals which
produce in this interrelation a certain kind of social meaning. One can take a
football match or card game as examples to explain what a figuration is: the
people involved form a figuration as their interactions are oriented to each
other in an interdependent way. The game is the ‘outcome’ of the interrelated
practices of the involved individuals and their ongoing process of playing. It
is ‘more’ than just the gatherings of individuals but at the same time not
something ‘beyond’ them. Or put differently: figuration means the ‘changing
pattern created by the players as a whole – not only by their intellects but by
their whole selves, the totality of their dealings in their relationships with
each other’ (). If we follow Elias, the fundamental idea is
to understand more or less durable social formations of humans as figurations:
they are constituted by the interdependencies and interactions of the involved
individuals and can be characterized by a certain ‘balance of power’ (), that is, power relations. The boundaries of each figuration are
defined by the shared meaning that the individuals involved produce through
their interrelated social practices, which is also the basis of their mutual
orientation to each other.
The idea of figuration has parallels to the concepts
of network. Elias himself emphasized repeatedly the relation of his idea to the
structural category of the network, for example when he describes the
interrelation of individuals in figurations as ‘networks of individuals’
(). Elsewhere he argues that ‘social figurations’ are a kind
of ‘human network’ () or ‘ordered network’ (). His distinctive take on networks becomes clearer when we consider his
detailed analysis of different figurations. In these analyses ‘network’ is an
important term to describe the relations of the intertwined
actors, especially when it comes to what he calls ‘game models’ of
figurations (). But Elias goes far beyond network as
a metaphor. The latter is helpful to analyse the interrelations of actors in a
figuration and to describe some fundamental characteristics of them as ‘models
of interweaving’ (). But the network does not yet describe
the co-oriented practices of sense-making in a figuration. Therefore, a
figurational approach means much more than describing the network of actors: it
means considering also the power relations, the characteristic roles in a
figuration’s actor constellation and the overall meanings that are thereby
produced.
Figuration has
also certain parallels to assemblage, as both describe the social world in
terms of processes of individuals’ mutual interweaving. Indeed Latour
explicitly refers to the idea of figuration (), although
without discussing Elias. However, figuration for Latour is not only a
figuration of human actors as ‘there exist many more figures than
anthropomorphic ones’ () and we must, he argues, analyse
figurations of humans and non-humans (). On this view,
methodologically grounded research into assemblages might itself appear to be
nothing more than the investigation of certain figurations, but with the
crucial difference that Elias, when reflecting on the role of objects and technologies
in figurations (), always makes a clear analytical
distinction between objects and human actors. This is an important point to
which we will return.6
A figurational
approach allows us to integrate the strengths of network and assemblage
analyses – their focus respectively on constellations of actors and
socio-materiality – while going further in explaining how the embedded
complexity of communicative practices works. A figurational approach indeed has
all the strengths of complexity theory, especially its sensitivity to nonlinear
causal processes, respect for the contingency of process and the possibility of
multiple outcomes, and insistence on the importance of emerging relations rather
than fixed objects. But it manages to achieve this directly within the language
of sociology and social theory. Indeed Elias’ notion of figuration was introduced
as a way of changing the social sciences’ ‘means of speaking and
thinking’. Sociology’s inherited vocabulary, Elias argued, freezes processes
into things, specifically things such as ‘norms and values’, ‘structure and
function’, ‘society’ and ‘individual’ (). Instead, we need
to grasp ‘the special kind of order associated with processes of social interweaving’, which means ‘start[ing] [. . .]
from the connections, the relationships, and work[ing] [. . .] out from there
to the elements involved in them’ (). A
‘figuration’ is ‘a flexible lattice-work of tensions’ () which,
while its development is open-ended, remains regular and interconnected enough
to form something relatively stable, and so worth analysing as a pattern.
The force of the
figuration lies in its basis in an understanding of relationships of meaning. Elias wrote that ‘the behaviour of many
separate people intermeshes to form interwoven
structures’ (). The term ‘intermeshing’ sounds like
mere metaphor, but the metaphor precisely captures a number of things: first, a
feedback loop (so much is common with complexity
theory, systems theory and assemblage theory); second, a feedback loop whose
paths are comprised of interlocking practices, acting
back on themselves; third, practices that interlock because, as meanings, they are in a mutual relationship,
answering, inviting, challenging, questioning and so on. The elements of a
figuration only have a common form (a con-figuration), because there is
something at stake in them, something that matters (is meaningful) to the
actors involved.
We can see plenty
of examples of figurations in times of a deep mediatization. Many are new,
involving us in new types of action in which new things are at stake.
Figurations may involve, at one end of the spectrum, chains of photo-exchange
on Flickr and information or debate threads on Twitter and (at the more
elaborate end of the spectrum) the whole interlinked ecology of platform-based
message circulation in which, for example, celebrity promotions, or friendship
building, or project promotion now evolve. We cannot grasp the dynamics of
these new processes unless we understand them as more than
associations of heterogeneous elements (assemblages) and more than structures of linkages (networks). The
figurations of online practice comprise an open (expanding) set of spaces for
interaction and dependency, in which we are enmeshed, as we try to go on doing
what we ordinarily do. Their dynamics also cannot be understood except within a
larger strategy to build an infrastructure for sociality online that is a
feature of the wave of digitalization.
The basic idea of
figuration already offers many of the conceptual tools we need for analysing
the complexity of our life with media (). As a figuration coalesces, it begins to stabilize
relations between what until then were disparate sites of practice. However,
Elias could not foresee the deepening of mediatization – with its waves of
mechanization, electrification, digitalization and now also (possibly)
datafication. As a result, for this context of deep media-based
interdependency, we need to specify three distinct dimensions of how
figurations stabilize: their relevance-frames, actor-constellations and
communicative practices, each of which is founded, in part, on relations of
meaning. Let us explain. First, each figuration has certain relevance-frames. By this we mean that the people
involved in a figuration have a common orientation to a shared ‘purpose’,
whether it be as a family, a group of friends, a collectivity or as users of a
particular digital platform. The relevance-frames of a figuration express its
social meaning as a distinct way of acting together. Sharing this set of
relevance does not of course rule out conflicts or disagreements. There can be,
for example, many conflicts in families as in any other kind of figuration, but
the point is that these are understood as family conflicts.
When it comes to our living with the media manifold, new questions arise: do
older relevance-frames get transformed by our relations with the contemporary
media manifold? How far are certain relevance-frames related to the new media
environment? And does this enable new types of figuration
to arise?
Second, each
figuration involves a distinctive constellation of actors.
This phrase has a double meaning. First, the individuals in a figuration are
not just a random accumulation of individuals. They are related to each other
in typical ways, for example, because they have specific roles in the
figuration (parents and children in a family). There are certain social
definitions of that relatedness (close or less close relationships between
friends etc.). Second, a figuration is a constellation of ‘human beings’
(). This does not mean that we should not consider objects
and technologies – including media – as elements in figurations, but simply
insists that objects and technologies are not part of the constellation of
actors who understand themselves to be acting together in this way. Figurations
can exist without objects and technologies, but they cannot exist at all without individuals. Therefore, its
actor-constellation is more fundamental to a figuration than the objects and
technologies involved in it. It is an arrangement of individual actions that is
characteristic for that figuration, but the constellation is also open to
change.7
Third, each figuration is based on certain practices that in turn depend on an ensemble of objects and technologies. Put another way,
each figuration is based on certain distinctive practices of communication and a related media ensemble (). It is through
the interrelated actions of such practices that individuals construct
figurations: that is, figurations involve ways of doing certain things
together, or in coordination, very often with and through media. The
communications that arise around those practices contribute to the overall
‘meaning’ of the figuration. But we cannot understand the practices of such
figurations without the objects and technologies we use in relation to them.
While not being necessarily a constitutive feature
of figurations – as relevance-frames, actor-constellation and practices (of
communication) are – figurations typically come together with
certain objects and technologies. Families, whether located at a single place
or mobile (like migrant families), have certain possessions: household goods,
maybe even apartments or houses. But they also have a variety of media to
communicate with each other. Nowadays, this is even the case for homeless
people for whom media can offer a certain ‘ontological security’ while being
forced to live on the streets.8
The character of these properties has a lot to do with the specificity of these
figurations and in addition supports a certain stability. A family with a great
amount of property and a rich media ensemble can develop a much greater
durability than families that primarily rely on personal relations. So it is
not just technology that makes figurations more ‘durable’ (); it is physical objects of all sorts.
To sum up, the
formation of figurations as patterns of communication in which something
distinctive is at stake emerges through the interrelations between three
dimensions: relevance-frames, constellations of actors, and communicative
practices, that have, as their basis, a particular ensemble of objects and
media technologies. These dimensions are relatively autonomous, but because
each is involved in the situation in which action occurs, processes of acting
together generally tend to reinforce them, and stabilize patterns of
association between them. All these dimensions are based
in relations of meaning. It is this attention to the distinctive
consequences that flow from social worlds as communicative orders between
human beings, built in part through regularities of communication
and meaning that is missing from the notions of network and assemblage.
What of the
larger social arrangements that emerge through figurations? We can approach
this from two angles: power and belonging. In both cases, a double perspective
is needed, asking on the one hand how figurations internally can be
characterized by their power-relations and belongings, and on the other how
figurations build power and belonging externally in the
wider social world.
Each figuration
has a distinctive actor-constellation, with certain characteristic power-relations. Elias wrote about ‘balance of power’
(), but that term can be misleading if we read it as
evenness. Particular figurations are characterized by certain ‘conflict-ridden
figurational dynamics’ (). But power-relations
in figurations are not just a matter of positioning in the
actor-constellation. They have a lot to do with practices of communication that
make sense of these power-relations. Analysing power in
figurations involves at least three levels: the positioning in the
actor-constellation, the practices that support power-relations, and the inscription
of power in the media ensemble. For example, as the analysis of gender
relations in families has demonstrated, power within them correlates with the
disposition of certain media technologies: the remote control, VCR etc.
(). If we think about contemporary media technologies,
the inscription of power with reference to gender even goes further: for
example, the preselection of a certain gender (‘male’, ‘female’, …) when
joining a specific platform predefines how as an individual one is represented
and so can act through communication.9
And if we not only reflect on the internal power-relations of this figuration
but also its external relation to other figurations, we have to consider how
far the overall orientation of a figuration – its relevance-frames – is related
to the power of this figuration more broadly. For example, being part of a
certain collectivity – a group of male refugees or the community of a shared
office – is related to the power that the members of this figuration have in
the wider social world, to which media discourses about this collectivity.
Figurations are
also closely involved in the construction of belonging (see the
detailed analysis of collectivities in Chapter 9). Belonging can have a purely situational
meaning. Think here about the figurations of games or the dance (Elias’ regular
example): sharing orientation to common interactions creates a certain
situational belonging of being part of, for example, the game or the dance.
Think of the figuration of spectators in a stadium. In such a figuration we
experience a deep feeling of communitization (Vergemeinschaftung:
Weber ()), a situational feeling of being part of a crowd
within an event (). However, this does not necessarily
result in being part of a longer-lasting community (Gemeinschaft).
In cases like these the deeply felt belonging is built up through the intensity
of the figurations’ practices. Today, occasions for figurations with such an
intense contextual meaning are more and more interwoven with media. The figuration of stadium spectatorship
cannot be understood outside of its media ensemble: loudspeakers, scoreboard,
display panels, and spectators’ parallel communications via their mobile phones
and tablets. But even more media-related are figurations of music concerts or
collective viewing of television and cinema in public places. And with digital
media we have the new figurations of online gatherings – in chats, on
platforms, through apps – through which we construct an intense situational
belonging to each other.
At this point, we
reach and need to go beyond the limits of the original concept of
figurations as Elias developed it. Starting from the late 1960s to the 1980s –
all before the emergence of the internet as an infrastructure for everyday
social interaction – Elias offers basically a hydraulic metaphor for capturing
the process whereby particular human beings become increasingly interdependent
through the flow of meanings, promises, obligations and performances. The term
captures well the length of these potential chains of
interdependence, but tells us less about the sorts of entities
that are bound into figurations. As a result, it tells us little – without at
least the additional work we do later in this chapter – about the forms of
dependence on system-infrastructure that are crucial to the very
complex figurations characteristic of our relations to the media manifold.
Elias only seems to conceptualize the figuration as an order that emerges from
the moves of the individual themselves: ‘by figuration we mean the changing
pattern created by the players as a whole [. . .] a flexible lattice-work of
tensions [. . .] a fluctuating tensile equilibrium, a balance of power moving
to and fro’ (). Yet, his own later reflections already
by the 1980s acknowledged that media and communications technologies, and the
large-scale systems they generate, were themselves already intensifying the
complexity of the social, and its degrees of interdependence, generating
‘fluctuations in what might be called “social pressure”, in particular the
“internal pressure” in a society’ ().
Certain types of
figuration – associated with distinctive ensembles of media technologies – generate obligations
and dependencies not just between individuals, but also between individuals and
communication systems, obligations that are distinctive features of how we live
within the media manifold, but which also characterize new types of figuration.
Let us start with
the most basic examples. Take the figuration of a family: this figuration is
now increasingly characterized by a distinctive media ensemble, whether it is
particular patterns of watching television together or in sequence, particular
uses of smartphones to organize family practices and interactions, the
photographs we share in printed photo albums or (more usually) via online
platforms. All these media contribute to the ongoing construction of a group of
people as a family, with all its contradictions, conflicts
etc. So too with the figurations of organizations where, with ‘ubiquitous
computing’, both inside and outside its formal structure, it has become, some
argue, ‘increasingly difficult to separate people’s interactions with other people
from people’s interactions with technologies’ ().
But we have to go
a step further: the media ensemble of a certain figuration is significant in
the way it moulds its various practices of communication. Mobile phones and digital
platforms mean a lot for families, when it becomes possible to locate family
members wherever they are, when family members can be reached at all times, and
when family members have reference to mediated representations of themselves as
a family on a continuous basis. These material possibilities of contemporary
media and related infrastructures not only offer better chances of sustaining
the family figuration in a particular way; they also mould our practices of
communication.
However, this is
not a ‘one-way-street’ of media effects. Figurations produce certain needs of
communication and therefore are an ongoing source for developing new media
technologies and adapting present. The digital platforms we live with, for
example, did not come out of nowhere. On the contrary, they
responded to families’ needs to be reachable across space and time. ‘New’
technologies get appropriated within a figuration’s media ensemble (), quite
possibly changing the figuration, and generating new demands for
media, and so on in an endless feedback loop. This offers again chances for
further media adaptations by ‘producers’ and ‘designers’.
Many of the most
recent media developments refer to fundamental human needs of connection. This is reproduced, further
institutionalized and materialized in the connectivity of
digital platforms (). Understanding our lives with media
means therefore grasping an ever more complex range of media-related
figurations. But to do this fully, we need to conceptualize the transformed
scale on which many contemporary figurations work.
Up to this point
we discussed figurations on the level of partnerships, groups and
organizations: that is, on the level of figurations that might be accessed
through an analysis of individuals who interact in an observable way. However,
there are figurations of much greater complexity, for example the figuration of
the global financial market. How can we grasp figurations like these without
becoming purely metaphorical? Asking this question means starting to think
about what we can call the ‘scaling’ of figurations.
Scaling is widely
discussed in complexity theory as a term to ‘describe how one property of a
system will change if a related property changes’ ():
complexity theory notes that there is no linear correlation between an increase
in scale and the changes in internal characteristics associated with this
increase. In assemblage theory, problems of scaling are also discussed, but
dismissed, with the insistence that it is not helpful to understand ‘macro’
phenomena as a container in which ‘meso’ and ‘micro’ are embedded: on this
view, the ‘macro’ is ‘another equally local, equally ‘micro’ place, which is connected to many others through some medium
transporting specific types of traces’ (). However, the
‘macro’ remains even on this account a place where decision-making power is
centred: governmental offices, corporate headquarters and the like. But what is
a government HQ if not a site where very many (rather
than few) connections are directly or indirectly coordinated? So the question
of ‘scale’ or at least, as Saskia Sassen () puts it, of ‘scaling’, cannot
be avoided.10 Remember that we
have already insisted that the media environment we access is a manifold, that
is, a many-dimensional object: why would we believe that the social world in
which we put that manifold to use in varying ways has any fewer dimensions? The social world is a
higher-dimensional manifold within which we can distinguish two distinct
principles of scaling or complexification: scaling through relations between figurations and scaling through the meaningful arrangements of figurations.
There are two
ways of relating figurations to each other: first, by linking
their actor constellations directly together, and, second, by building
figurations of figurations. Linking actor constellations takes
place when one actor of a figuration becomes part of the actor constellation of
another figuration. There are many researched examples of this, especially in
network analysis.Some actors have power because they are ‘switchers’ () that link different networks. When powerful actors make such links
between figurations, they build hierarchical relations between them. Take
companies as an example: the heads of certain working groups – themselves
figurations – build a cross-cutting figuration (of department management) which
is headed by one of its members who is again part of the figuration of heads of
department etc. So by following the links between the actor-constellations we
get an understanding of how a certain company is internally structured and how
its power relations work. We can integrate more informal figurations into such
a description; for example, the figuration of an interest group that meets
regularly in this company to discuss certain interests, linking up diverse
groups of people across the company. Similar ways of relating figurations
through linked actor-constellations can be found in other parts of the social
world: in relation to the various associations of public and private life,
educational institutions, political parties etc. Such relations between actor-constellations
depend however on there being figurations which share something in terms of
frames of relevance.
A more complex
way of joining up figurations (and so enabling figurations to operate on much
larger scales) is what we can call figurations of figurations.
In this case the actor-constellation of a figuration consists not only of
individual actors but of ‘supra-individual actors’ (),
that is, actors that themselves can each be considered as figurations in their
own right. Saskia Sassen () uses the term ‘configuration’ similarly to
describe European or even global relations of states, companies and other
complex kinds of actors. But how far does it make sense to conceptualize
supra-individual actors in this way? In our everyday language we have no
problem naming certain organizations, social movements or even states as actors
when we say that they ‘do’ this or that. Analytically speaking,
supra-individual actors are always ‘composite actors’ (),
that is, actors made out of individual actors, or composed of figurations of
individual actors. As a consequence, the agency of these supra-individual
actors is nothing other than the agency produced by this figuration. But when
does a figuration gain this kind of agency?
Some figurations are either too situational or too
conflictual to be incorporated into wider figurations of figurations. The
supra-individual agency of event spectatorship has no sustainability beyond the
event; the ‘established and outsider figuration’ in the suburb investigated by
Norbert Elias and John Scotson () is also too conflictual to have a
shared agency. Conversely, a figuration of otherwise unconnected individuals
can become a supra-individual actor when the practices of the involved
individuals ‘result in a orderly whole, thus not only occasionally but
systematically build on one another in a way that an overall
objective is pursued’ (). In
the contemporary social world, there are two kinds of figurations in which this
is the case: ‘collective actors’ (or ‘collectivities’, discussed further in Chapter 9) with intense shared
patterns of interpretation as in social movements; and ‘corporate actors’ (or
‘organizations’, discussed in Chapter 10) such as companies and public authorities,
associations and clubs in which binding agreements on their agency are
constructed in more or less formal negotiation procedures (). Both kinds of ‘supra-individual actors’ can themselves contribute to
a figuration of figurations: companies can build groups of companies,
associations can build umbrella associations. A figurational perspective
therefore is not just about recognizing that groups, organizations, cities and
nations are different kinds of ‘assembled’ individuals (): of course they are, but this doesn’t tell us very much! More important
is analysing the interrelation of the figurations
involved, their actor-constellations, their practices and the new relations of meaning (including pressures to
sustain new relevance-frames, actor-constellations, practices
in common and underlying media ensembles) that result from building
pre-existing figurations into a larger arrangement, or figuration of
figurations.
Media ensembles
may be crucial to this process. Collective actors like social movements and
other corporate actors use media to construct their common agency in various ways.
It can be by shared communication via digital platforms as in many contemporary
social movements (), or it can be through organized
communication processes like in many companies (). The
negotiated shared ‘will’ of these supra-individual actors is typically
materialized in a media form and by this made durable.11 Indeed, more boldly,
we might look back on the history of the internet discussed in Chapter 3, and see this as the
emergence over time of a many-dimensional ‘figuration of figurations’, achieved
through the ever-expanding meaning-based linkages, that is, through hyperlinks.
Also crucial are the infrastructures that can be
built through the links between communications under particular controlled
conditions, such as social media platforms. Social media platforms provide a
space for specific figurations to be sustained or created: the overall
structure of interdependency that results includes also our relations to the
underlying platform. That is what we mean by saying that we are now involved
not just in single figurations, but also in figurations of
figurations. When, for example, Facebook breaks down or imposes unacceptable
privacy conditions, the multiple levels of the interdependencies in which we
are involved become suddenly and brutally clear to us.
There is however
a second principle for scaling figurations: meaningful arrangements.
Several times already we have emphasized that any attempt to understand the
construction of the social world through communication is necessarily a theory
about shared meaning production. We understand meaning at this point in the
original sense of Max Weber () as Kulturbedeutung,
that is, cultural meaning as actors in the social world produce it. In such a
perspective the figurations of the social world also have – beyond any concrete
links between actor-constellations – meaningful arrangements with each other.
So, for example, national government agencies are figurations that are understood as ‘centres of power’ in relation to many
other figurations. Such constructions of some figurations as ‘powerful’,
‘public’, and so on, and others as ‘weak’, ‘private’, and so on are only partly explicable through the interrelatedness of their
actors or through the composition of ‘figurations of figurations’. For, in
addition to such structural links, figurations in which we live also ‘hang
together’ () with each other through relations of meaning, and
this ‘hanging together’12
derives from two distinct sources: certain discourses that
connect these figurations and their meanings in the social world, and certain larger-scale relations of interdependency between domains of
action (for example, the transport infrastructure and the economic
infrastructure) that come to be associated with assumed relations of
meaning. Both types of arrangement go beyond the simple inclusion of actors or
figurations in a larger or more complex figuration (or figurations of
figurations).
Peter Berger and
Thomas Luckmann tried to explain something like such arrangements of meaning
through the notion of ‘symbolic universes’ (). Symbolic universes were for them ‘meaningful totalities’
that share an overall understanding
of the social world. They offer an ‘all-embracing frame of reference, which now
constitutes a universe in the literal sense of the word, because all human experience can now be conceived of as taking
place within in’ (). But this functionalist
reading of how meaning contributes to order was never fully plausible even when
they wrote, and it is absolutely implausible today in an age of proliferating
meaning-making across countless national and transnational digital media.
Berger and
Luckmann’s language of ‘symbolic universes’, if applied here, would suggest
that all figurations fit neatly within functioning meaningful wholes. But this
underestimates the variety of different discourses
that relate figurations to each other by ‘telling’ or ‘explaining’ the ‘overall
sense’ of certain figurations, and so, over time, construct larger-scale
patterns of related figurations sustained by interrelations of meaning (rather
than by the structural linkages that make up, for example, figurations of
figurations). Such discourses are not just rational constructions.13 First and foremost,
they establish ‘affective bonds’ () or, as we would prefer
to put it, relations of meaningful interdependency, across
different figurations, and in a variety of ways. Let us think about the web of
figurations in which the figuration of a contemporary family is involved: that
family has the responsibility of organizing the leisure and upbringing of its
children; it interacts over many years with organizations (schools, adult
education centres, universities) that are regarded as having certain
responsibilities for education. But over time, those children develop
independent relations with external institutions (cultural institutions for
leisure purposes; companies and organizations that are responsible for
providing employment), and so the family over time develops meaningful
relationships with an ever-expanding, indeed changing, set of other external
figurations (and figurations of figurations), right up until the parents become
old and in need of care. Those external figurations are themselves further
understood to stand in relation to various levels of government in a public
domain, which media institutions themselves help to define and shape.
Our argument is not that such webs of figurations connect up in such a
way as to create an overall functional whole of societies. Our approach is
precisely not functionalist, since relations of meaning within such webs are
always potentially contestable and interruptible. We want instead to insist on
the importance of such connecting discourses whereby the ‘macro’ becomes
embedded in the specificities of ‘micro’ actions through relationships of
meaning. Put another way, individual actors come to learn to act in a social
world characterized by discourses about what ‘society is’ and how ‘society works’ ().
Such relations of
meaning can emerge in another way too, not directly through discourses of
meaning but through deep practical relations of interdependency that ‘hang
together’ as what seems to be a ‘way of life’ that, as such, gets taken to be
meaningful ‘as a whole’. So for example actors in an economic market depend on
the workings of the transport system, and actors in the financial markets
depend on the workings of communications systems. If one breaks down, the other
cannot continue. Such relations of interdependency continue up to higher
dimensions without limit. Such is the complexity of the practical
interdependencies on which contemporary life depends that actors struggle to
make sense of all of it as a meaningful whole: this is where new
types of discourse or myth emerge to make sense of it all, as a whole, as a reality
().
What we call
‘society’ is much more than a container for different figurations (); rather it is the overall ‘hanging together’ of figurations (and
figurations of figurations) across the many domains of action associated with a
large spatial territory. Insofar as these forms of hanging together are based
on meaning, they have a mythical rather than material character. Those myths do
not describe an ‘objective reality’ of the social world, but are particular
constructions of it, which help hold in place assumptions about
how its domains of action ‘fit together’ in a wider ‘order’ (see Chapter 10 for more details). There
is a long history of such myths, which have been associated with media
institutions and their ongoing claims to social legitimacy, and this is not the
place to unpack this history in detail. But it is enough to mention that
today’s myths of this sort go far beyond the legitimacy claims of old media institutions
(for example, major public media), and encompass the mythical claims about
collectivities brought together on social media platforms and the access to the
‘social’ supposedly achieved through ‘big data’.14
In the process
perspective we are taking here, no social phenomenon is just given. Even
figurations that remain over a long time ‘the same’ – figurations of religious
organizations, for example – have to be constructed as ‘the
same’ through action and interpretation. Alongside change, there is also
‘inertia’, yet attempts to preserve figurations and to avoid change can have
the unintended side-effects of ‘strengthen[ing]’ a figuration’s ‘tendency to
change’ (). Good examples are religious organizations or political parties in
which the efforts of the organizational elite to keep them stable stimulate
tendencies of critique, long-term instability, and so change. And equally it is
possible that practices which are intended to change a figuration might
strengthen its tendency to remain unchanged. For example, some actors’ ideas of
change might be oriented in different directions, and by this make specific
changes difficult. Any description of figurational transformation on a large
scale is necessarily complex.
What weight
finally should we give to media technologies of communication in such
transformations? It is a question of the ‘moulding’ potential
that derives from a figuration’s media ensemble. A changing media ensemble in a
family, in a peer group or in a shared office community does not necessarily
transform the figuration itself: the family, peer group or office community
might stay the same. A changing media ensemble only results in transformation
if a figuration’s practices of communication are also transformed and with them
the ways in which meaning is produced within that figuration.
Nor is internal
change of the media ensemble simply driven by external changes in the media
environment. In many cases where figurations transform – maybe in most of them
– it rather will be as a result of an interaction between internal and external
forces. Think of a company: very often the reason to change its media ensemble
does not take place accidentally but by management decisions. New internal data
systems or new social media platforms are introduced to fulfil certain aims
better: to process information more efficiently, or to reach customers more
effectively. The media ensemble is made to change
because at least some of the actors hope to better achieve their aims. But the
side-consequences may be very different from how these actors intended it.
Employees might, for example, appropriate data systems in subversive ways to
build up their work procedures in a more convenient way. And whether changes in a media ensemble change the dynamics of a figuration remains a complex matter for
local investigation. So, as already noted, some figurations (religious
organizations) may remain quite stable in spite of their increased uses of
digital media: the fact that the office of the pope is active on digital
platforms does not change its power-balance as an institution. In each case, it
is a matter of understanding the dynamics of particular interrelations.
There is no ‘logic’ of media that drives changes in figurations: there is at
most media-related change of various sorts in the field where the relations
that make up a figuration, or figurations of figurations, unfold in a
non-linear way.
Both internal and
external aspects of a figuration can transform fundamentally in a changing
media environment. This has first to do with new possibilities of how figurations can become
related to each other. As we have argued in Chapter 2, the fundamental characteristic of each
medium is that it offers possibilities to act beyond the here and now, and by
this to extend the reach of human agency. It is, as Elias already noted,
especially through media that ‘chains of
interdependence become more differentiated and grow longer’, and so ‘become
more opaque and, for any single group or individual, more uncontrollable’
(). This means that figurations can more easily spread across
space and time (something we will discuss in the next section of this book). A
company, for example, can much better integrate dispersed parts of its
organization; administrations can reach different places; a family can hold
together while being at the same time located transnationally. This does not
mean that location ceases to matter in an age of deep mediatization. On the
contrary, our relations with the media manifold privilege locations
of high media connectivity (): across such locations figurations can
spread much more easily, and come into contact with each other, for example the
transcultural environments of cities that offer opportunities for linking
actor-constellations in multiple ways (). It is a key characteristic of huge cities and metropolises, that
these are places where very different figurations cross and intertwine.
Life with media
in the age of the media manifold is inseparable, we have argued, from
involvement in a variety of different figurations that exist in complex and
sometimes contradictory constellations. Such figurations exist in arrangements
of varying levels of complexity, involving, on the one hand, links between
actors or the incorporation of pre-existing figurations within ‘figurations of
figurations’, or, on the other hand, relationships of meaning that in practice
bind particular figurations (and figurations of figurations) into large-scale
interdependent relationships. So far, we have just described the ‘how’ of
figurations, and we have not yet reached the question of ‘so what?’, that is,
the consequences of figurational patterns for wider social order, or what we
might call the ‘figurational order’ of contemporary societies. We reach this
finally in Chapter 10, but
before that, in the preceding chapters of Parts II and III, we need to pass through various intermediate
stages of analysis: in Part II, space, time
and data; and in Part III, the
implications of deep mediatization for the self, for collectivities, and for
our possibilities of governing social space.
Space is an
important means by which communication contributes to the construction of the
social world. There are three aspects to this. First,technologies of
transmission may enable communication between two entities that are spatially
distant from each other, creating new first-order interactions. Second,
communication-at-a-distance also enables new links between those such
first-order interactions, establishing through this new second-order
communicative relations. Examples of this are the development of royal
sovereignty across a territory and the emergence of power through information
systems or platforms. Third, second-order communicative relations change, more
broadly, the basic possibilities for interaction of all
sorts in a particular social domain (for example, where protocols govern
information processes in a way that underlies the space of communication that
we call the internet). Each of these spatial aspects of how communication
contributes to the construction of the social world involves figurations of
various sorts. In this chapter, we unpack these processes, which are of varying
degrees of complexity.
In a sense, there
is nothing new here: the entanglement between space and communication is a banal feature of modernity. Modernity has been based on
increasingly many forms of communication-at-a-distance, from
communication by horse, pigeon or letter – the older forms of mail – to more
recent forms of communication by television, radio signal or computer-to-computer
linkage. Through those forms, new types of social space have been built:
broadcasting territories constituted by the space where a signal reaches;
online communities of people who have never physically met; password-guarded
domains of online interaction. There are few, if any, parts of the world which
are untouched by these changes, even if, as we signalled in Chapter 3, the spread of media
remains in some respects highly uneven and the idea that modernity or mediatization
takes just one form, framed by the West, is deeply misleading. A decade ago,
one of us () tried to capture this interaction
between media and space through the concept of ‘MediaSpace’: a dialectical
concept that captures
the many levels on which the spatiality of media’s operations may contribute to
the wider ordering of space and society. Much of this contribution occurs
implicitly. Mass media contents do not usually refer to the spatial
aspects of their own production, distribution and reception – they represent
the world instead from a generalized, de-spatialized standpoint – yet the
spatiality of media always operates in the background, displacing social reality in various ways (). We explore such processes of displacement further in
this chapter, before at the end considering briefly the new displacements that
derive from the role of software and data-processing.
Transformations
of space through media have generally been combined with transformations in
time. Take the telegraph and the telephone: they enabled the speeding-up of translocal communication () and led to distant actors being able to sustain communication
between each other regularly in time, at least if they travelled to key network
nodes (the telegraph station, the landline phone). The media manifold, and
particularly the embedding of ‘social’ online platforms in everyday
interaction, have involved a huge deepening of this first shift. They have enabled
in many parts of the world not just discrete many-to-one (broadcasting) or
one-to-one (interpersonal) communications sustained regularly at a distance,
but, through the infinite communicative reserve of the internet, reciprocal and continuous communication-at-a-distance
from (almost) any and all points to (almost) any and all other points, and
within a range of temporalities.
These more recent
extensions of communication across space, however uneven they may be
geographically, generate fundamental new issues for the social organization of
communication. For example, there is the problem of communicative excess. This
occurs when the volume of communications received, and requiring response, at
one point in space becomes arbitrarily large by
reference to the processing capacity available at that point, as has happened
through the massive expansion of the means for non-synchronous communication:
as a result, what we call the ‘figurational order’ of the social world (see Chapter 1) risks becoming unstable.
Put paradoxically, the increasing mutual entanglement or practical ‘hanging together’ of actors and processes in
space (and time) facilitated by today’s online communications may undermine the
wider order of our habits and practices (its normative
‘hanging-together’ as an arrangement for living in common).1 ‘Keeping up with
things’ is no longer a matter of improving one’s efficiency of response in only
one communications interface like email, but rather managing a communicative
excess across
multiple independent platforms. But how, if at all, do we sort between the various communicative infinities with
which we each must deal? We will come back to the consequences for our
experience of time in the next chapter. There is however a contradictory
movement which points, in some domains, to a massive intensification of
coordination across space achieved through communication: we refer to what
Karin Knorr-Cetina calls the ‘synthetic situation’ of ‘scopic media’ () which in, say, the global
financial markets provides a shared focus for thousands of dispersed actors,
based on the commonly available visual displays taken-for-granted. These
movements need to be understood together.
We separate time
and space in these two chapters purely to make the presentation of our argument
more manageable. Both are affected by the same progressing deep mediatization
of the social world, and the analysis of spatial relations cannot be neatly
separated from the analysis of temporal relations: what matters are the
interconnected relations of space–time (). By the end of the next chapter, we will be able to put all
this together in an account of the changing figurational order of contemporary
societies.
This chapter is
organized as follows. First, we review some general principles for thinking
about the space of the social world, and how communications contribute to its
transformation; then, we discuss particular types of social space and their
communicative features; finally, we turn to the disruptive implications for social
space of software and the information and data infrastructure more generally.
We are now ‘in
space’ in a different way from those who lived in the preinternet era.
Translated into the language of our argument in preceding chapters, media – and
specifically the media manifold of digitalization – have changed something
fundamental about the spatiality of the social world.
Sociologist
Sanyang Zhao () expressed the point most clearly when he noted that online
communications have transformed the starting-point for a phenomenology of the
social world: Schutz’s key distinction between consociates (Umwelt) and contemporaries (Mitwelt).
If consociates are those with whom a human being comes into direct contact, the
internet has expanded this set of people beyond those one meets face to face.
As Zhao puts it:
‘instead of using corporeal copresence as the standard for judging all forms of
human contact, we must now treat face-to-face interaction as one of the many
ways in which individuals come to connect [as consociates] with each other in
the [. . .] internet era’ (). Online communication is not
therefore a supplement to face-to-face interactions, but one of the basic ways in which we encounter and get to know
people. It is a ‘there and now’ () which supplements the
‘here and now’ of face-to-face interaction described by classic phenomenology.
We gather online to meet others whom we do not ordinarily meet face to face.
This has two basic consequences: first, ‘the internet has [. . .] expanded the
lifeworld’ to include the online domain (), and, second, no
longer is the face-to-face situation ‘the prototypical case of social
interaction’ ().
This changes the
dynamics of how we learn as social actors. Online consociates, in principle,
become ‘legitimate source[s] of mutual knowledge’ (). Yet Schutz had already anticipated something
like this in his reflections on the telephone (). As Schutz, solo, wrote in 1964, ‘we are less and less determined in our
social situation by relationships with individual partners within our immediate
or mediate reach, and more and more by highly anonymous types which have no
fixed place in the social cosmos’ (). Through a later form of telephone – the almost universally
adopted mobile phone – we have in the past two decades become accustomed to
operating in more than one space ‘at once’, with surprising consequences on
occasion for the contexts in which some interaction streams get received
(). Such shifts in how social resources and processes are
configured cannot be understood if we think about the consumption and
production of media in a narrow media-centric way that focuses only on media
contents and not on mediaspace. When the (more or less) continuous availability
of an online Mitwelt changes people’s conception of the ‘space where
[they] meet people’ (), then broader
aspects of social coordination also change, as new ‘sociospatial regimes of
dependence’ () emerge.2
Meanwhile, in a very different way, the installing of information technologies
embedded via radio transmission devices in ever smaller and more widely
distributed units across everyday life () is changing the ways in which space and society
become ordered. The increasing saturation of everyday space by processes of
tracking and monitoring,
involving the continuous capture and combination of data, is changing the way
space ‘feels’ in many parts of the world, and particularly, but not
exclusively, cities.
Before getting
lost in the details of these transformations, we need to take a step back and
think in general about the nature of spatial relations within the social world.
‘The relation between space and social life is [. . .] very poorly understood’:
so wrote two remarkable architects whose book on the power-relations that flow
from the design and organization of living space has been unjustly neglected
(). There is a reason for the blind spot of
which Hillier and Hanson complain (and indeed for the neglect of their work):
the reason is that we live embedded in places,
moving from one to another through the day, and building our path through life
out of more or less successful appropriations of
space in the form of the places that we occupy. Those who are fortunate to have
security of spatial relations – and the recent ‘migrant’ and ‘refugee crisis’
in Europe, Africa and Asia reminds us that this is very far from everyone –
move from the security of their living-space to that of their workplace, easily
forgetting the importance of the spatial resources needed for everything they
do, and every movement they make. Yet space is a scarce resource (), and our achievements of ‘place’ – the ability to impose a ‘schema’ of
interpretation and organization onto particular
regions of space () – rarely get grasped as appropriations of
that scarce resource. A materialist phenomenology however requires an
appreciation of space and, more specifically of the role that technologies of
communication play in the construction of place, locality and scale.3
A geographical
perspective is essential here, because it looks unwaveringly at the
inequalities in the distribution of spatial resources that may not be visible
from particular locations. Attention to space is not just a matter of noticing
the differences of resource within and across space, but also of grasping the
spatiality of the larger spaces of circulation that connect
up all the points of economic, social and cultural life and their
highly uneven consequences (). Attending to ‘space’
means thinking about the materiality of relations.
According to the
great French spatial theorist, Henri Lefebvre, ‘social space’ is ‘not a thing
among things’, but ‘a relation between things’, something that ‘encompasses their
interrelationships in their coexistence and simultaneity’ (). This approach fits well within a figurational approach to social life. The
production of social space, Lefebvre argued, is crucial to our possibility of
social experience in and between particular places. More than that, space’s
basis in material relations means that space cannot be understood without some
reference also to time, that is, relations across space and within time. The
very notion of space – that is, the frame through which we conceive of things
happening or being situated in the ‘same’ space – depends on ‘the simultaneous
coexistence of social interrelations and interactions at all spatial scales,
from the most local level to the most global’ ().
For that reason,
space cannot be exclusively understood in terms of place or locality. Space,
insofar as it is relational, is, as Bruno Latour pointed out, in large part an
achievement of actors themselves, as they build new material connections between localities that can be embedded into
action-contexts (). The increasing complexity and variety
of how, in our contemporary modernities, social and economic relations are
sustained across space through globalized communication and exchange means that
many spatial relations are today not strongly anchored in particular ‘places’
or ‘localities’ – that is, in fixed and bounded space-containers. One of the
first to grasp this connection was Wolfgang Schivelbusch in his reflections on
the impacts of the railway in the nineteenth century in Europe. Schivelbusch
wrote that ‘henceforth, the localities are no longer spatially individual or
autonomous: they are moments in the traffic that makes them possible’
(). The point has been developed in relation to late
twentieth-century technological acceleration, leading some geographers to
suggest that globalization (and specifically ‘transnational connectivity’)
changes ‘the very ontology of place and territoriality itself’ (). The argument is not that place, locality, and scalar relations disappear
completely, but that they are not the only type of spatial relation in a world
of ‘multiple geographies of belonging’ and ‘multiple spatialities of organization’
(). We must acknowledge therefore the distinctive
contributions that the concepts of place, locality and scale make to our
understanding of space (): all are transformed
potentially by deep mediatization. It is particularly important not to abandon
the notion of scale.4
As the Brazilian cultural theorist Roberto Da Matta put it, ‘it is basic to
study the “&” that ties the mansion to the slum dwelling, and the enormous,
terrible, fearsome space that relates the dominant to the dominated’ (). Relations of scale, and
breakdowns in relations across scale, are crucial to understanding inequality,
and the power-relations that flow from inequality.
That is quite consistent however with arguing that
the relations between localities are intensified with mediatization and
globalization. What more and more matters is a ‘translocality’ (): that is, the mediated interrelations between various localities. Localities
do not dissolve: as embodied human beings, we have no choice but to act from a certain locality, even if the resources on which
action from that place relies are themselves distributed. But these localities
change their meaning in a social world made up of ever more complex translocal
connections. As a result, a certain degree of spatial complexity becomes
intrinsic to the social world: this complexity is enacted through the operations
of figurations.
Sites of social
experience vary hugely in their spatial organization: indeed their different
feel may depend directly on the difference in how key resources – from housing
to food to culture – are distributed across them. As Lefebvre ()
puts it, ‘every society [. . .] produces a space, its own space’, and that
space may be profoundly differentiated, even while particular institutions
represent it as ‘unified’. From a historical perspective, a key aspect of our
modernities was shifts in spatial relations caused by a new ability to sustain
economic (and other) relations across large distances and in increasingly rapid
time-rhythms. Ever since the early inventions of news relays (),
media have played a role in the shaping of space and territory. The modern
nation in ‘the West’ and outside ‘the West’ () was always a translocal space
sustained in part by the production and circulation of media and by the linked
improvement of other material things and bodies (transportation). Media’s key
role in sustaining ‘nationhood’ does not stop today, even if media do not
always work to sustain particular nations: nationhood, through media and other
forces, remains part of the ‘deep structures’ of modern life ().
What specific
challenges for our understanding of social space do digital media throw up? New
forms of translocal communication – above all, via the internet – have
intensified the complexity of spatial relations, and created new types of
spatial inequality. Imagine two living spaces, one connected to the internet
and the other not: they are very differently embedded in the distribution of
both communications and wider resources, with major implications for their
inhabitants’ ability to act on various scales. Once common claims that new
technologies of communication abolish space are profoundly misleading: what
matters instead for the contemporary social world is the ‘adjusted distribution
of co-presence’ (). Put another way, the history
of spatial relations has always been a history of exclusion, sometimes morally
disguised as ‘purification’ (), and there is no reason to think
that an age of deep mediatization is any different. Indeed some geographers
argue that the intensified infrastructures of late modern life splinter cities
into segregated networked spaces that variably benefit from ‘bundles’ of
networked infrastructure, including digital communications (). Meanwhile, behind the apparently free global flow of media
representations and information signals lie hidden inequalities of news
production which shape the sources and therefore contents of those
representations (). To get at this, we need to think not
about individual actions or the space where individual actions are performed,
but about the relation between wider patterns of action, and the hidden
constraints that shape their distribution: what Swedish geographer Torsten
Hagerstrand called ‘coupling constraints’ ().
Think for a
moment about specific actor-constellations and their problems of space- (and
time-) coordination. As everyday action assumes increasingly
the ability to adjust continuously ‘in real time’ to the demands of distant
others through mediated communications, plans for managing, say, a family’s
movements across space become more complex. Prima facie this reduces ‘coupling
constraints’ by solving some problems of how this movement can be coordinated
with that movement; but, through the levels of coordination now relied upon, it
may create new problems. Contemporary families, as figurations characterized by
coordinated media use, are able to cope with much greater spatial complexity
than families previously did, but, by the same token, they become ever more reliant on the consistent availability of the resources
that make such coping possible: that is, continuous access to the same flows of
communications across the family. When this breaks down – a phone battery loses
charge, someone enters a zone without signal, or some more serious obstacle to
communication intervenes – then a breakdown at all levels of communication can
ensue. The figuration of the family is increasingly dependent today, even for
its basic functioning, on the wider figuration of figurations of which internet
infrastructure forms just one part, and this applies (even if in very different
forms) to rich elites who own large numbers of media devices and to poor families for whom ‘media’ is a single
shared mobile phone through which
signals can be sent (by dropped call) or money remitted across borders.
From another
perspective, the folded nature of digital
communications – with every webpage containing many additional links and
possible pathways or resources – only intensifies the complexity of how
people’s relations to space are differentiated through their variable uses of
media. Whereas a great majority of communications today assume some access to
the internet, it does not follow that all people have the same level of access:
quite the opposite is true. As a result, the way that social space is ordered
has also changed. The process of locative media, for example, provides
space-related information, but also signals actors’ positions in space to
systems that track this: in this way locative media create, as the Brazilian
writer André Lemos notes, ‘augmented realities [. . .] integrated, mixed
processes that merge electronic and physical territories, creating new forms
and new senses of place’ (). These augmented spaces are
intensely differentiated, and important new power-relations are constituted by
control over space-related information.
More generally,
the diversity of how actors interact with the infinities of spatially relevant
information may require a notion of ‘metaspace’ to get at the changing
possibilities for how we move through space and socialize with others (close or
distant), and the role that media interfaces and formats play in shaping these
changes (). For some actors, as Humphreys puts it (), ‘mobility, sociality and mediality’ converge. Media in various
configurations now involve us in multiple and changing relations to space and
place. As a result, one person’s ‘metaspace’ – her or his way of operating on
space and so configuring their life spatially – may be incompatible with
another’s.
It goes without
saying that networks are important, and that effective network access (for
example, through social media) positions us differently in relation to
resources, as they are distributed in space, compared with the lack of such
access. When, for example, sitting with our laptop or phone, we ask a network,
or consult YouTube, for advice on how to cook a certain dish, or fix a computer
problem, we access a networked resource. Rather, however, than rely on broad
claims about the relations between ‘networks’ and ‘society’ – for example, Manuel
Castells’ () claim that networks and their interrelations structure
the very possibility of society – we need a more differentiated account of ‘how
the connections are implemented’ ().
The next section
will explore some entry-points to a richer account of how media’s embedding in
the social world affects spatial relations.
One way of
getting clear on ‘where people are’ through media is
to think about where they gravitate (where they tend to be, and to be
oriented), when relatively free to choose what they do. We will come shortly to
how people act socially in work environments, where they use media but may lack
control over the particular media platforms they use.
It is a measure
of how much has changed in the relations between media and space that we even
feel the need to ask a question about ‘where people are’ with and through
media. In the era of modern media before the past eight to ten years with its
wave of digitalization – when hundreds of millions of people across the planet
became used to continuous fast internet connection within the media manifold – we were where our bodies were, plain and simple,
situated within the social context where our bodies were set: at work or in our
bedroom, at school, in a factory or office. Maybe we would have had media on in
the background, or would have been using media as an occasional tool to find
something out that we could put to use in our immediate context; maybe we would
have been consuming (or, if we were a media professional, producing) media
content in a focused way. True, we already knew by the early 2000s that mobile
phone use could cause a layering of places and localities that was sometimes
problematic (), but when the mobile
phone call ended, so did the problem. Immersive games through computer-based
interfaces () were already a first indication of a broader
transformation: the possibility of seeming to be ‘somewhere else’ although
situated, through our bodies, in a particular place. But games have always been
a special domain of social life and, except in pathological cases, their
liminal status is not generally assumed to affect the normal flow of everyday
interaction.
Within, however,
a context of deep mediatization and the media manifold it is meaningful to ask ‘where people are’
with and through media, whether they are sitting in a classroom, an auditorium,
a café or a park. Even if they are not immersed in games, they may be involved
through media in a significant number of non-playful interactions with distant
others. People may be visible to many distant others
– or watching many distant others while remaining invisible themselves
– through their relation to interactive spaces where a large number of things
are going on, some
involving them and some not. People may be commenting on things going on (on
Twitter, Facebook, a chat stream, email) in ‘live’ interaction spaces involving
a stream of others, but with traditional media content (say, a downloaded TV
programme) watched in the background. They may have various feeds coming in
from a range of sources, hooking them temporarily into new interactions. It is
still possible of course for someone to be watching a live broadcast TV
programme or reading an online newspaper intensely, but many of those will
simultaneously be following one or more streams of commentary around that media content on other media.5
As a result, the
primary ‘where’ of the social world may, for many people, be shifting over to the sites sustained by media platforms and
people’s interactions with and across them, as well as to a general orientation
towards an expanded set of online information and personal encounters. As a
result (as Sanyang Zhao notes), the boundary between the private embodied
‘here’ of the computer, tablet or phone user and the public ‘out there’ of the
audience for a particular communication may be blurred, weakening our sense of
an offline world which is not part of the
online world, and irreducible to it. Spaces of work and spaces of family
interaction are two good places to look for detailed examples.
In working
environments, extensions of everyday social interaction may change some of the
mutualities built into face-to-face interaction. This may lead to problems of
reciprocity, responsibility and mutual visibility: so Heath and Hindmarsh
() argue in a study of working environments that depended on the heavy use
of screens linking to remote spaces. The resulting ‘disconnection between
action, object and environment’ () may, they argue, undermine the
assumption of reciprocal substitutability of perspectives that for
Schutz was essential to the face to face, yet these working environments have
to be managed and lived through somehow, so workarounds and repairs develop.
The consequences
of such extensions are likely to be complex. Take the case of telemedicine,
where the spatial reorganization of the people, resources and information flows
in the complex process of caring for patients at a physical distance leads,
according to one writer (), not just to a spatial extension,
but to a change in the meaning of the process.
There are shifts in authority and legitimacy, which have to be managed by the
actors, and ‘an expansion [. . .] of what it means to care for distant
patients’ (). The medical practice in question has been ‘stretched out’: ‘when extended in space
and time, medical practices are put under pressure in that some of the existing
taken for granted assumptions and practical arrangements become unsuitable for
the new conditions of work’ (). So for example the
informal and partly improvised exchanges of expertise normal on the hospital
ward-round need to be newly configured, with a new distribution of roles in the
figurations’ actor-constellations, when human and non-human members of the
therapeutic team (doctors, nurses, administrators, measuring devices, etc.) are
placed in multiple locations. The outcomes may well be positive for some
actors; for example, carving out a space of autonomy for the nurse which did
not exist on the ward round.
The everyday
reliance in many types of work on distributed information systems (for example,
the so-called ERP or ‘Enterprise Resource Planning’ system) is one example
whose consequences cannot be understood phenomenologically if we think about
one situated context (). It is necessary also to
consider how various actors, coordinating across multiple sites, are enabled to
co-orient themselves to a reality that is distant from all of them,
through a process that Schutz and Luckmann called ‘appresentation’, that is,
the perception of something ‘as present when we have no original experience of
it’ ().
In the sphere of
political ‘work’, there are also examples of the positive extension of the
political process, as when situations online generate new possibilities of
action. An interesting example was the political campaign that emerged around a
YouTube video portraying a protest against corruption in Mexico in 2012; it
showed 131 protesters challenging a Mexican minister after the government had
dismissed the corruption and protest as of no consequence. When new people
started adding the comment on YouTube ‘I am number 132’ (‘Yo soy #132’), this
led to a campaign with that name (). Here the
extension of political process, drawing in actors across a large nation in a
chain of communication and affirmation, depended on the flexible (because
indexical) reference point of the Twitter hashtag: a new figuration of action
emerged, based on the simple grammar of repetitive textual practice across a
distributed platform. No distortions or stretching out of space seemed to be
involved. Rather, this was a new type of action, although the grammar was
limited to an additive one: it was not possible to do more than add one’s name,
for example by commenting on the complexity of the case or related injustices.
Sadly, the surveillance structure of digital space made participants in this
network subsequently vulnerable to government spying and the capture of their data (), a point to which we return later.
The
transformation of work practices by media technologies has parallels in family
practice. First of all, the distribution of media use and degrees of online connectivity
becomes a key factor in the structuring of family living-space, giving new
meaning to the organization of the space of the home (). On the
face of it, extended communication and money transfer networks allow family
relations to be maintained at new distances to the benefit of all concerned.
Media anthropologists () and the media sociologist
Jack Qiu () argue this for extended families of migrant workers in the
Philippines and China respectively.6
Even for families who are not always stretched out across space, ICT and mobile
media enable them to coordinate their activities, and their thoughts and
intimacies, while their spatial trajectories are temporarily dispersed (). The contemporary figurations of families can
maintain a ‘connected presence’ () even across complex spatial
schedules: in that sense the family becomes a ‘distributed family’
(). In a corollary of the point about the extension in space
of social actors’ Mitwelt, our closest and most
familiar consociates (family) can now perform that role
continuously in time in spite of physical separation (). This tendency of apparently de-spatializing technologies to reinforce close ties, not diffuse them, was already
noted for the landline phone in the early twentieth century ().
The role that continuous online chat forums play in linking generations within
a family is also significant. It is not trivial when a sick elderly relative
can be ‘present’ at a wedding through interaction on Facetime: the boundaries
of the ritual space have been extended, allowing ‘family’ to be performed in a
new way. But whether these various forms of intensified ties are overall
positive for families is a much more complex question: Christensen already
noted the ‘dual role’ of media technologies in ‘both integrating and dispersing
families’ (). Insightful work on Cameroonian migrants also suggests
a different outcome: ‘experiences and expressions of pressure, compulsions and
expectations’, because they cannot be fulfilled (perhaps when those at a
distance lack the time and money to maintain support), may lead to the
‘disintegration of relationships’ ().
For young people
who either still live with their families or have left home but are looking for
relationships, media have transformed friendship and peer relations just as
profoundly as in families if not more so. Here too it is a mistake to think
that the potential extension of friendship relationships to larger scales has been
the dominant change, when more important is the intensified maintenance of friendships across space. For young
people of school age in richer countries, still under full parental and school
control, the ability to maintain continuous exchange and conversation with
their friends and peers while remaining in the confines of their bedrooms or
while travelling to and from school, is a major extension of not just their
sociality but also their sense of the space where their
lives play out. The closed bedroom door is no longer a protective wall around
solitude or isolated absorption in an imaginative world through media; it is a
wall that guards the entry-point back out into the
world of peer interchange that had stopped at the front door.
danah boyd’s
() authoritative study of US youth’s use of online media is clear about the
importance of the extended spaces of agency and sociality that social media
platforms provide, but also about how they bring additional pressures, strains
and responsibilities: subtle new distinctions may emerge within the ‘space’ of
social media platforms, for example between the ‘publicly private’ and the
‘privately public’ (). Extending the space (and time) when peer
pressure can be communicated and modulated increases the scope of mutual
surveillance or co-veillance (). In a number of countries a
rise in bullying is a concern of policymakers and educationalists: it may not be
accidental that in a recent international survey the two countries where young
people were most unhappy (the UK and South Korea) were also the countries in
that sample with most intense connectivity.7
Such problems, and the accompanying benefits, matter because they transform
relations of meaning, as Mexican researcher Rosalia Winocur makes clear: ‘it is
not digital convergence in itself that provokes the transformations in the
realms of society and communication, but the way in which its possibilities are
imaginatively transposed into the diverse
socio-cultural conditions of young people’s everyday lives [. . .] [by] the confluence of meaning that it organizes’ ().
For young people
who are seeking new friends, whether to find company with peer-types not
available in their normal milieu, or, if a little older, to find romantic
partners, media act as a clear extension of the space where connections can be
made, public presence achieved or experimented with, and identity performed.
This extended space may be of particular importance for those whose sexual
identity and its performance is discouraged or punished in public space, such
as young gay or lesbian people living in conservative rural America (). And even later in life, long-interrupted friendship or acquaintances can
be revived more reliably
and effectively than was possible before the age of social media platforms
through the use of social networks.
So is the
following recent story from a Spanish newspaper typical, or precisely
exceptional and so in need of advertorial puff?
She is from a village where he used to spend all his summers (), one of those places where people greet each other in the street and hang out together in the same bars, shops and plazas as each other. But they didn’t meet there, but in the world’s most populated country: Facebook.8
It is not easy to
separate out the actual degree of change here from the hype. But the fact that
major extensions in the modalities of possible sociality are under way is
beyond doubt.
So far we have
discussed the increasingly complex spatiality of figurations such as the family
and groups of co-workers. But media transform interdependencies also on higher
levels of organizational complexity, for example, within figurations of
figurations.
On this scale,
technologically based communication media enable entirely new types of work-space and work-relation, and so help
sustain new practices of work. Karin Knorr-Cetina’s pioneering studies of the
global financial market start out from Schutz’s reflections on shared worlds of
work, with their intense sense of special time and common focus. While for
Schutz such shared focus required physical co-presence, this is no longer the
case, as the case of global financial markets shows. Screens that present a
filtering of multiple streams of events, data and actions marshalled into a continuous
ordered flow of ‘information’ can provide the shared focus of attention for
micro-interactions among actors in multiple locations, bringing ‘the
territorially distant and invisible “near” to participants, rendering it
interactionally or response-present’ ().
Knorr-Cetina calls these distinctive types of media, which depend not just on
networked screens but on a huge background computing
power to process and sort data from many sources, ‘scopic media’: through their
concentrated action, they enable new, shared acts of seeing (from the Greek
word skopein). As she writes, ‘scopic media visually present
and project events, phenomena, and actors that would otherwise be separated by
distance and would not be visible from a single standpoint’ (). The result is a transformation of what counts as reality for the thousands of actors involved: ‘the screen
is not simply a “medium” for the transmission of messages and information. It
is a building site on which a whole economic and epistemological
world is erected’ (). The
force which scopic media have depends not just however on the infrastructure of
transmission but also on the claim of
comprehensiveness made on behalf of what is brought together through that
transmission: they ‘[stitch] together an analytically constituted world made up of “everything” potentially relevant to
the interaction’ (). The result is the
creation of a new space not just of vision, but of action.
While the scopic
media of the global financial markets seem a special case, because of their
extremely high levels of technological infrastructure, geographical span and
intensity of time-interactions, it is not hard to find other, less extreme,
examples of how, through the reliable concentration of technological media to
focus a particular type of attention, the
centre of gravity of social interaction shifts. Locative media may become
embedded in collective behaviour, but always against the background of
distinctive cultural norms and histories. So Hjorth and Gu () write about
the use of the locative platform Jiepang in Shanghai (a platform similar to the
US Foursquare) and argue that, given the very different cultural attitudes to
privacy in China from in the USA or Europe, the platform enables a form of
social coordination across space: ‘the key motivation is to both see where
their friends are and report on new “cool” places’ ().
‘It’s like a diary with location’, one 25-year-old woman they interviewed said,
but of course a diary that is continuously available to a distributed group
(). A great deal of complex variation lies behind the term
‘infrastructure’: the affordances of particular technologies such as mobile
phones may be experienced very differently on the ground in different places,
depending on economic, regulatory and cultural circumstances, since
‘infrastructure’ is a ‘dynamic process that is simultaneously made and unmade’
().
Yet such
enhancements of local information can induce an intensified ‘parochialization’,
as people are encouraged to link up with those who are physically very close to
them, but based on a proximity encountered not through ordinary social
interaction, but through an institutional push (‘X is near you right now’),
leading even to a ‘social molecularization’, rather than an enriched
appreciation of social space.9
There are counter-examples of course: for example, artistic projects that draw
on the enhanced placeand information-coordination possible through digital
platforms to generate new forms of awareness of the spatial regularities of
city life that are largely
hidden, because they are not ‘seen together’. A fine example is the Barcelona
art project called Canal Accessible, which asked disabled people to identify
via their phones physical obstacles they encountered as they tried to move
across the city.10
Media are then involved in multiple types of ‘scopic regime’, more or less
intense and integrated, and with many varied consequences for how their users
are embedded ‘in’ space.
Perhaps there is
a general paradox here. As Hartmut Rosa suggests (), by being more
connected through digital media, we may become more self-sufficient in any one
place, and so less in need of mobility. But since
face-to-face communication time still counts for a lot, this paradox is probably
more apparent than real. It is also misleading to see all these transformations
as only involving space: the trajectory of all these transformations is, after
all, not to enhance mobility for its own sake, but to increase people’s
capacity to act. We start to see here the importance of the
myths, discussed in general terms at the end of the last chapter, which hold
beliefs in such possibilities of coordinated action ‘in place’. Those myths may
however be very much at odds with a deeper differentiation in
people’s powers to act that continues in spite of, indeed reinforced by,
technologies’ role in extending communications in space. Most obvious are
differences between women and men. Whereas marketing for smartphones always
emphasizes their power to coordinate lives for anyone (man or woman), it is
generally women for whom technologies of communication lead their family
pressures to spill over into the work space (), while it is
particularly men’s work pressures that spill over into the family space,
reproducing a very old division of domestic labour () in which
women have, by default, the primary responsibility for domestic labour and
caring, including any unexpected demands.
Meanwhile, other
communications infrastructures – figurations of figurations – sustain new
everyday spaces of interaction. By contrast with the augmented reality of
locative media, which tend to benefit individual actors in particular ways,
social media platforms can, in general terms, work as a space to act together
and in concert, a collectively identified space of encounter and action (). As boyd argues, the key contribution of social network sites, at
least for young people in the USA, is not to extend the range of people with whom they interact (an extension of
existing interactions), but rather to provide an otherwise unavailable space of action, a new centre of gravity, as it were, that
was not there before and which escapes the control of parents and so
potentially reshapes the symbolic organization of everyday life ().
It is tempting to
read these transformations as involving solely the extension, via transmission, of
communicative relations in space (and time). Facebook indeed makes sense this
way, because it allows extended exchanges between those who have previously
been in contact, or who can readily imagine being in contact with each other.
Other platforms such as Twitter are however very different. One does not have
to be a celebrity used to communicating to a mass audience to end up
interacting with people one does not know at all: people who have retweeted or
commented on something one has posted. Indeed, Twitter, although experienced as
a space of exchange, is not a space at all but a presentation of
linked data in a continuous flow that creates the illusion of a space for
direct exchange. Yet, unlike in a physical space, ordinary users of Twitter
cannot know or imagine the set of texts potentially relevant to them that are not presented in that flow. The ‘space’ in which they
act is therefore shaped by the selective productions of software and data
processing: it is, as Zizi Papacharissi puts it, ‘an algorithmically rendered
materiality’ for the social (). It is time then to turn to
software’s implications for social space more generally.
A materialist
phenomenology cannot avoid the challenge of thinking about how the experience
of social space is now being transformed by the embedding of ICTs and data
processes of deep mediatization. This is happening in fundamental ways never
envisaged by classical phenomenology. Social space is being transformed by the
ability of unseen others (or unseen systems) to see us from a
variable distance, whether we are stationary or moving around. This is not, as
in science fiction, because we literally carry cameras on our bodies, but
because software allows the textual and image traces we leave online, and the
data derived from them, to be captured remotely and made available for further
exchange and processing.
We need to
consider cases where new types of trans-spatial encounter change our
possibilities for performing self within an enlarged
horizon of visibility, that is, both in front of others we do not and cannot
know () and for continued mobile contact with
those we know and care about. It is impossible to live on a permanent and
boundless stage: in the film The Truman Show,
Truman only survived as long as he didn’t know his world was a
stage. So there may in all this be an intensified need to maintain boundaries around the interactions with loved
ones we want to protect. Our continuous, if unwitting, ‘transmission’ via the
GPS function of our mobile communication devices, creates new issues about social order and the
legitimacy of surveillance. As Mark Andrejevic puts it, the new ‘revelatory
role of location’ (), based on data transmission, takes the risks of
‘public’ space to a quite different level.
Meanwhile, as a
number of geographers have shown, the spaces of ordinary locations – or at
least the spaces many take for ‘ordinary’ such as airport lounges and
supermarkets – are deepened through the operation of software, which enables
new types of movement by some agents while restricting that of others. As
Kirchin and Dodge note, there are now many spaces (so-called ‘code/spaces’)
that are constituted only and entirely through the operation of software:
‘space is not simply a container in which things happen; rather, spaces are
subtly evolving layers of context and practices that fold together people and
things and actively shape social relations’, such as the airport
security zone (). The embedding of
software in the organization of everyday life () is of even wider importance, but it is less clear whether it shows
that space is changing as such, or rather that actions in, and
mobility across, the social world are increasingly subject to differentiating control through ever more
discriminating software systems. Such discriminatory control affects physical
movement – the system that decides whether a particular passport holder is able
to leave her or his country, or arrive in another () – but it can
segregate and order non-physical spaces: the system that rejects one’s credit
card as one sits in a restaurant waiting to pay. Either way, the actionspace of
everyday reality (and the institutional decision-space built around everyday
life) is now increasingly ‘software-sorted’ (). This has
implications, directly, for how urban and other spaces feel: we may become aware of a ‘splintering’ () of the urban which operates by principles that are not
visible, and indeed not directly accessible, to individual actors.
We can go
further. The spatial conditions of self-formation in everyday reality are
changing significantly. Everyday space in the digital era is not just mediated
but ‘networked’, that is, its action-possibilities are structured by the
hierarchical and differentiating work of informational networks. A space where
your Wi-Fi password works is a different actionspace from one where it does
not; a system which only allows you limited access and action-options is very
different from one which allows you full access and freedom to act. As a
result, just beneath the spatial surface of everyday reality are developing new
topologies: networks that link one set of persons into certain possibilities
for action, but cut off another set of persons from
those same possibilities.11
Such implications are relevant to the consideration of the self to which we come
in Chapter 8 and are
themselves in need of a more extended treatment of the implications of ‘data’
for materialist phenomenology (Chapter 7). First, however, we must move to some
concomitant transformations of social time in the era of deep mediatization.
We return to the term ‘figurational order’ in
Chapters 6 and 10. As a result, people may become used to meeting
people in new types of space, for example in the social media feeds linked to a
popular television programme:
research on Brazil for example provides multiple examples (). We are not impressed therefore with anthropologist
Tim Ingold’s proposal that we drop the notion of ‘space’ altogether (), which seems like an exemplary case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
In contrast to Marston et al. (), see here our
criticism in Chapter 4. According to Pew Research Centre (), 53 per cent
of all adult cellphone owners in the USA have used their phones ‘recently’
while watching television ‘for engagement, diversion or interaction’, while
Google research reported that 77 per cent of television viewers in the USA also
watch television with another device (generally a smartphone, laptop or PC)
with them (). For the broader literature here, see Valentine
(). Guardian 19 August
2015, reporting on 2015 Good Childhood report by the Children’s Society: https://www.childrenssociety.org.uk/sites/default/files/TheGoodChildhoodReport2015.pdf.
El País 20 August
2015, page 40: ‘Juan y Juana’, by Natalia Junquera (translated by us). See Humphreys () on the early platform
Dodgeball in USA. See http://www.megafone.net/BARCELONA, discussed by
Cornelio and Ardevol (). Here the term ‘topology’ can, finally, be used in a
non-metaphorical way to capture the contrasting continuities and
discontinuities of action that characterize differently qualified actors in
code/space (contrast the discussion in Chapter 4).
It is through
time that we grasp the process of everyday life. Time, whatever particular
forms it takes, is a fundamental dimension of life. We understand this directly
when we consider that to have one’s life spatially confined may still be
consistent with a possible ‘good life’, whereas to have one’s life cut short
is, except in cases of extreme suffering, an absolute loss.1 Life is the process of living forward in time.2
This chapter will however be concerned less with the sense of inner time that
each of us has, and more with the social aspects of time, that is, time as a
dimension of the social world.
When we consider
time in the social world, we cannot ignore space. We have already emphasized
this at the beginning of the last chapter, where we quoted Henri Lefebvre’s
definition of social space as ‘a relation between things [. . .] [that]
encompasses their interrelationships in their existence and their simultaneity’ ().
The possibility of distant things being in a relationship to each other
continuously, at each moment in time, is the reason why
we must think relationally about social space, as we did in the last chapter.
Time is not just extended duration but involves relations of simultaneity across space. That is
why, as one of the leading UK analysts of people’s experience of time-pressure
notes, ‘coordination is as much about space as it is about time’ (). Time – the experience of time moment-by-moment – is therefore, in
this sense, the vehicle through which individuals experience the relatedness of life, the costs and benefits of such
relatedness, and the connection between such relatedness and the underlying
organization of space. Figurations will, as we shall see, be a particularly
important entry-point for grasping how such relatedness is sustained and
managed through media.
Time has always,
in part, been imagined in terms of relations. Religious concepts of time, as
ways of thinking about the relatedness of all things and beings, continue to be
important today. So, when Evangelical Christians in the UK seek to challenge
the fragmentation of a secular modern urban life, they ask ‘what time is it?’
(). Particularly important for our discussions of media and
information infrastructures is the modern concept of clock time (). Clock time matters for our understanding of media’s relations to time for three reasons. First,
this is because media institutions (like other institutions) operate in
accordance with clock time. Second, because media are one of the most important
institutions for reinforcing our awareness of the passing of clock time: for
example, radio stations announce the time throughout the day and news websites
generally have an embedded clock. Third, because media, as the primary modern
means for focusing the attention of large dispersed populations around shared
reference-points, are part of the infrastructure of time, with interpersonal
media such as the mobile phone extending the domestication of timekeeping in
new ways (). In this respect, media are concrete means
by which the inherently social basis of
time-differentiation () is worked
through in practice. For all these reasons, major changes in the way that media
bind space together are likely also to have major consequences for the
objective and subjective aspects of time. This was the lesson of important
research into nineteenth-century transformations in communications technologies
(), and it is equally relevant today.
Time – in the
sense of simultaneity-across-space – is part of what media institutions sustain. Media and information infrastructures have
long been involved in marking the passing of life’s socially recognized stages
and events. Indeed that may be one of their more important roles, as Paddy
Scannell () was one of the first to point out. It is generally accepted
that ‘modern technologies of communication’ are ‘changing the human perception
of time’ (). However, to understand fully the role of
changing media and information infrastructures for the social world we have to
go further in times of deep mediatization. Time may be one key way in which
media can disrupt the embedding of the individual in our
increasingly complex social world. Time, felt as a sense of necessary
interrelation and obligated connectedness, may not always be compatible with
the sense of time as duration that we might want to sustain for ourselves and
our loved ones. Time is therefore intimately connected with the compatibility between lived experience and social
relations, that is, with the sustainability of
what in Chapter 1 we called
‘figurational order’. That is the importance of phenomenology’s insistence on
understanding the social world from the starting-point of reciprocal
obligations: the importance of time for sociological analysis is missed
entirely if we start from the premise that relations with others are merely
options for an isolated consciousness.
In his book Social Acceleration,
Hartmut Rosa () proposes that time plays an even more decisive role
than space in the shaping of modernity, because the spatial aspects of everyday
life are more fixed and inflexible, whereas the temporal dimensions are more
fluid. As already argued, time and space cannot be analysed in separation from
each other, at least when we think of time as simultaneity-across-space. Nor is
it necessarily helpful to characterize temporal relations as more fluid than
spatial relations. But Rosa points us towards something important. Time,
because of its intrinsic relation to consciousness, is an inherent dimension of action, and of communicative
action in particular. While a conversation’s basic nature and meaning is
unchanged by being sent across distance, for example by telephone, it is changed by being elongated in time: silence is
eloquent. Communication, in other words, always depends on a continuous
unfolding of time for its enactment, whereas communication does not depend, in
general, for its enactment on a continuous movement across space.
As a result, the
relations of space and time to power are not the same. We can sometimes feel
immune from spatial power (that is, power over space): we often only discover
spatial power when we try to move from one place to another and find ourselves
blocked. But wherever we are, we can never feel immune from temporal power
(power over time), since it is implied within communication itself (‘you will
do this now, later etc.’): perhaps drugs are the only release
from our sense of onward time (time-pressure being a common theme of anxious
dreams), but it is temporary at best.
Put more
formally, time is the principal dimension along which social order itself is
worked out through communication, the only limits being its acceptance by
people across space as an exercise of power from somewhere else. The normative
force of figurations – and figurations of figurations – is therefore worked out
in time and cannot be understood without consideration
of how meaning unfolds in time. For this reason, time is a key dimension of how
communications are involved in the construction of the social world. Time is
the dimension where we see a social life’s ‘figurational order’ put to the
test.
In this chapter,
we will give emphasis to certain tendencies of time-pressure that are based in
the potentially global connective infrastructure of the internet (and the data
processes associated with the internet), but have their prominence, for sure,
not everywhere, but in particular rich countries and among other countries’
elites. We are not claiming that these tendencies are, or are destined to be,
universal, or that the internet is the only factor today shaping the figurational
orders of the social world (once again, we take seriously the critique of
media-centrism).3
It is worth at
this point going back to Schutz. Schutz’s understanding of the social world
begins from the experience of intersubjectivity: the necessity of being
‘oriented’ towards others. Schutz (in his solo writings at least) insists that
‘communicative action also implies some kind of anticipation of the other’s
understanding of one’s action’ (); this in turn
implies a shared time in which understanding can be achieved and worked through
in time (). Elsewhere, Schutz acknowledges the
variable role of communications technologies in maintaining such simultaneity
in spite of (perhaps increasing) physical distance:
Depending on the state of communications technology, the symptoms whereby the other is apprehended can decrease while the synchronization of the streams of consciousness can still, to a certain extent, be maintained. ()
Schutz here
provides the beginning of an insight into time-relations as a key focus for
understanding our obligations of reciprocity, and their potential vulnerability
to technological change.
Luckmann later
acknowledged that ‘abstract social categories of time’ which operationalize
individuals’ sense of time can organize social interactions ‘in total disregard
of the rhythms of inner time’ that get synchronized when two individuals are in
direct face-to-face interaction (). But in Luckmann’s
discussion it is hard to see beyond this clash between these two types of
time-organization, ‘abstract’ and ‘inner’: there is no sense of how time works
to organize the social world in a broader way, including
by the deep embedding of external coordination into the fabric of
individual lives. Indeed there is a bias in Luckmann’s approach towards the
dynamics of inner time and the synchronization of the inner times of
face-to-face interlocutors and interactors rather than the broader dynamics of social coordination and control through a socially
sustained sense of time.4
Was this view ever plausible, for example, in the early stages of Western
modernity? We doubt it, but certainly it has absolutely no plausibility in an
age when the rhythms and categories of media’s operations play a major role in
social coordination. It is important to be clear about the difference that
media and communications infrastructures make here.
Media make time concrete: individual
time, social time, and the reference-points (for example, time-measurement) on
which both individual and social time are based. Therefore, media are ‘social
metronomes of the everyday’ (). As a result, media provide
a focus for new ways of systematizing and regulating the social world: with
mobile phones enabling new practices of micro-coordination.5 Media therefore play
a key role in establishing and instantiating the ‘system of tensions’ in
society (), with social media platforms intensifying
this process massively.6
For Elias, the sustaining across ever larger spaces of a shared sense of time was the entry-point for grasping
how modernity itself evolved as an ever larger system of interdependence and
obligation. Elias’ discussion of ‘tempo’ is vivid:
This ‘tempo’ is in fact nothing other than a manifestation of the multitude of intertwining chains of interdependence which run through every single social function people have to perform [. . .] the tempo is an expression of the multitude of interdependent actions, of the length and density of the chains composed by the individual actions, and of the intensity of the struggles that keep this whole interdependent network in motion. [. . .] a function situated at a junction of so many chains of action demands an exact allocation of time; it makes people accustomed to subordinating momentary inclinations to the overriding necessities of interdependence; it trains them to eliminate all irregularities from behaviour and to achieve permanent self-control. ()
A dense network
of connection exacts its ‘price’ in individuals’ felt obligation to manage
themselves in time. From Elias’ great insight, the contemporary
social theorist Hartmut Rosa has developed a theory of late modernity as an age
of intensified ‘social acceleration’. We will come to details of Rosa’s thesis
later, but its core is that, with deep mediatization through the acceleration
of technologically based communications and many other processes, an increasing
gulf emerges between our space of experience
and our horizon of expectation ().7
For Rosa, the ‘temporal structures’ of any society have huge consequences for
its members’ possible ways of life. The reason for this is that ‘temporal
structures and horizons represent one, if not the, systematic link between
actor and system perspectives’ (). Rosa’s extension of Elias’ work is
both plausible and important. A similar sense of the importance of time in
constructing social order is found in Niklas Luhmann’s work. Luhmann pointed
out the special role that time plays in the weighting of activities against
each other, and even, potentially, in ‘confound[ing] the order of values’
(). Temporal structures then, as Elias discovered, have a ‘normalizing character’ because they create a frame in which
local coordination is not optional but necessary, if wider coordination is not
to break down: they provide in this way a privileged point for grasping overall patterns of order and disorder.
From here, we can
directly see the importance of media’s relations to time within the mediated
construction of reality.8
Yet the media manifold and the particular figurations embedded within it
arguably lead to distinctive types of time-pressure, more intense than any
Elias envisaged.
We noted, in the
last chapter, media institutions’ historic role in sustaining ever larger
collectivities’ sense of togetherness and practical coordination across space.
Because of the interlocking of space and time, we could just as readily insist
that media institutions have for a long time played a key role in sustaining
spatially bounded collectivities in time (). There
are some distinctive features of how today, with deep mediatization, media and
information infrastructures sustain relations of co-consciousness (as Schutz
would put it) across space and time. First,
they do so between any one point and any other, since
the building of internet access into many mobile phones and devices means that
simultaneity need not be orchestrated only from an institutional centre of
production: I can draw you and others into continuously tracking me simply by
uploading to a digital platform a picture of what I have just done in a
different continent, although in doing so I am of course relying on an
infrastructure that depends on many networked concentrations of resource.
Second, transmission speeds are close to instantaneous,
whatever the size of content transmitted. This does not lead to the erasure of
time as experienced, but, quite the contrary, to a growing
sensitivity to the ‘little temporal differences’ (): we
notice (and often judge negatively) when an SMS or chat message goes unanswered
for some hours, or when an email goes unanswered for a day. Third, there seems
in principle no limit to how much the size of transmitted content can go on growing, even if, at a certain point,
speed of transmission becomes for most purposes instantaneous, which implies
that the burden of interpreting and processing content received from co-conscious interactors can also grow
without limit.
Two decades ago
Paul Virilio prophetically expressed the resulting superfluity of information
as ‘the generalized arrival of data’ (). The relative acceleration
of digital information transmission means that, rather than actors relying on moving themselves or
their objects across space, they may stay in the same place and access
information about most things where they are: the importance of the space
in-between seems erased (). But the outcome is
certainly not a universal sense of acceleration.
Not only do people react against acceleration (as they perceive it), but
intensified flows of communication lead to breakdowns of figurations and new
forms of inertia or slowed-down reaction ().
Meanwhile, our access to the past is changed by the expansion of information
available in and across ‘the present’. Does this undermine the uni-linear
nature of temporal development, as Rosa claims ()? We would prefer
to say more modestly that we inhabit a social world characterized by the
pluralization of temporalities, on the one hand, and the complexification of
technological systems for the coordination of temporality, on the other.
Certainly, the
range of interlocking forces pushing the social world towards ever greater
temporal coordination – often locally felt as acceleration – is formidable:
competitive economic pressures, cultural pressures, and socio-structural
pressures, each of them intensifying one or more moments in the underlying
‘circle’ of seeming social acceleration. That ‘circle’ itself, according to
Rosa, can be broken down into three elements: technical acceleration,
acceleration of the pace of life, and acceleration of social change and the
perception of social change. The key point is that the circle of influences
that reinforce the experience of social acceleration is
‘largely immune to individual attempts to interrupt it’ ().
Put another way, time is involved not just in the relations through which
figurations, and figurations of figurations, are built, but also, more widely,
in the construction and sustaining of a wider figurational order
(see Chapter 4) which is not directly accessible to individual adjustment.
Figurational order (to recall Chapter 1) involves large-scale ways of organizing things in time (meta-processes), which no actor can challenge without
undermining the practicality of cooperation itself (something no one wants to
undermine). Media and information infrastructures therefore achieve more than
‘technical acceleration’, the accelerated transmission of information: they
actually shape the figurations through which these intensified relations of
interdependence are enacted, and so the possibilities of social order through figurations.
The outcome can
seem to be a dramatic temporal dislocation: a world in which the demands of
work and system, reliant on mediated systems of communication, spill out far
beyond the normal boundaries on which everyday habits seem to be built. There
are serious issues for work-related inequalities here, and more generally the result,
some writers argue, is to damage the fabric of life itself. Media devices are
one of the most vivid embodiments of the push towards constraint connectivity
and 24/7 living. In Japan, rules of instant response around the friend-focused
platform Mixi have taken the ‘culture of instantaneity’ () and the principle of constant connectivity (found in many cultures today)9 to a high pitch of
intensity: as a result, many young people sleep with their phones on or under
their pillow (). Jonathan Crary writing from
New York generalizes this phenomenon into a paradoxical ‘24/7’ way of living
which, because it can never be realized (human beings have to sleep in the end, or die), imposes an
impossible injunction whose effectiveness ‘lies in the discrepancy between [any actual] human life-world and
the evocation of a switch-on universe for which no off-switch exists’ (). The crucial point however is that these processes are not
simply processes of acceleration; they are instead intensifying figurations of meaningful interdependence whose medium is
technologically based platforms of communication. That is why our sense of
being ‘harried’ (under continuous pressure of time) is associated not so much
with having less time, but with the problems of coordinated performance linked
to the ‘density of social practices’ ().
Yet it is only
apparently a paradox that these developments are described, and not just by
marketers, as a form of freedom. For, if we understand freedom as a complex
social achievement of collaborative interdependence, then as Claus Offe once
noted, ‘the more options we open up for ourselves, the less available as an
option is the institutional framework itself with the help of which we disclose
them’ (). The injunction towards constant connectivity is part
of that ‘institutional framework’. Because in democratic societies, at least,
we start by resisting the idea that we are unfree, it requires considerable
work to expose this authoritarianism to view, as something we must confront and
change (). Elias’ concept of figurations however helps
us see this infrastructure as a process of emerging interdependence that
actively shapes our very possibilities for action and imagination. At the core
of such processes of interdependence are changing forms of media and
communications.
Before we
elaborate that broader point, let’s make a more basic point about how we
understand the mediated construction of time. Time-relations are socially constructed. The point is
not just that what counts as time is socially constructed (), but that what is measured together as continuous
time is also constructed. According to Roberto Cipriani, ‘[t]he question of
time is centred on a series of relations’ in terms of how two or more events
are conceived as constituting some sort of series (). Cipriani
quotes Elias: ‘clocks certainly help us to measure something: nevertheless, this
something is not exactly time, which is invisible, but something which is very
tangible like the length of a working day or the eclipse of the moon, or the
speed of an athlete who runs the 100 meters.’ The spatial extensions of our
social world through social media platforms also change the durations and
sequences that are considered measurable (the ‘time’ of a Facebook newsfeed is
one very recent, but now pervasive, construction of sequence).
In addition, the
individual experience of time is constructed through the figurations in which
we are involved. With the change of media and information infrastructures these
figurations have also changed, transforming the temporal dimension of the
social world and the positioning of the individual in it. Media, through their
role in enabling new, ever more stretched-out, figurations of figurations, have
changed the ways in which (the gearing through
which) particular forms of accelerated process are interlinked with other
forms. This affects the overall speed at which our social sense of time seems
to be transformed.10
In Elias’
analysis, a new tempo of the social world developed historically over several
generations, emerging gradually through felt contradictions between prior habitus
and emerging social pressures: such a contradiction might occur over time, over
the life course of each individual, but the social response only takes shape in
new cultural guidelines that require generations to develop (). But with the embedding of norms from social media platforms into daily life
we may be witnessing a faster transformation, over a single decade, with
implications for intragenerational as well as intergenerational relations ().
Not that those
changes are felt evenly across space; everything depends on the organization of
practice. As some sociologists note, ‘temporal scales are institutionalized
through the production and reproduction of [. . .] practices’, for example in
organizations and professional environments, generating distinctive ‘temporal
orientations’ (). In the next section on media’s
detailed consequences for changing forms of temporal order, we need to bear in
mind both universalizing pressures and how people are differentiated precisely
in terms of their time practices, and their relative resources for controlling
those practices.
So far our
comments have been generalized, designed to get into view some features of
contemporary populations’ relations with time through media. As noted in Chapter 5, there is no way of
offering a general account of infrastructure from an abstract ‘nowhere’, since
infrastructures of connection work very differently in different places, and
the consequences for time are no exception. Indeed time is itself an
infrastructure socially constructed from many different sources.
In this section,
we want to consider in more detail the changing practices whereby people are in time, and media’s role in sustaining those temporal
relations. We should bear in mind the consequences for the social world of the
shift in the balance in communication from the face to face to the spatially
dispersed and non-synchronous. The same shift might also be expressed in terms
of a transition () from a world dominated by ‘thick’ time in which
actions are embedded in contextual sequences that have clear relations to each
other and to specific time-sequences, versus a world in which ‘thin’ time is
more prominent, that is, an organization of time which provides fewer clear
coordinates for action. As Ellison puts it: ‘increasing instantaneity and
simultaneity [. . .] can be associated [. . .] with a concept of thin time. [.
. .] Owing to the complex ways in which time becomes packeted in the digital
universe, individuals have to become accustomed to processing, communicating
and acting on information across a wide range of “fields” literally
“instantaneously” and “simultaneously”’ (). For sure, the
consequences of accelerated communication are more complex than just a
supplement or enhancement. As an Australian father of two young children
interviewed by Melissa Gregg put it: ‘[we are] spending less awake time chatting to each other. We are separate’ ().
In some media
cultures there is a growing sense in everyday experience of a deficit of time:
not ever having enough time to do what one has to do. The problem is much more
than technological acceleration: it is a matter of the changing interrelations between economic, cultural and social
practices, affecting actors of all sizes and on every level, and media and
information infrastructures’ changing involvement in all
those interrelations. Indeed, because the internet is a connective space – its potential to connect is
effectively unlimited – it amplifies this problem, without limit.
The individual actor may sense a contraction
of the present. What we call ‘the present’ is not an objective measure of time,
but our delineation of the everyday as a sphere of action and planning during
which we are entitled to assume ‘no further change’. Accelerated
communications change the ‘present’ because they create pressures to bring
forward the moment after which further change must be accommodated. This is the
consequence not just of the acceleration of communications, but also an
‘accelerated transformation’ in ‘the context of communication and action’
(). Only within ‘the present’ can we draw conclusions
based on experience ‘to date’ and so securely orient our actions; when the
volume of signals incorporated into ‘the present’ increases, perhaps to an
arbitrarily high level, social actors may have a problem, and may lose the
capacity to react to communications.
An important way
in which this happens is through ‘multi-tasking’. The changing distribution of
work across space increases possibilities for ‘still doing’ multiple tasks even
if one has moved away from the location originally associated with that task.
But if multi-tasking is facilitated by intensified communication-at-a-distance,
it has a profound impact on our sense of ‘the present’. It imports the time-signals
and time-related obligations from multiple activities into a single time-flow. Little wonder then that one of
Southerton and Tomlinson’s UK respondents speaks wistfully of ‘the most
relaxing part of the day [when] I only have to do one thing’ ().
Absolute
comparisons of speed of transmission and interaction are therefore only a small
part of the story we need to consider. After all, speed only affects us if it
requires an adjustment in our practice, and such a requirement is
only registered at all if it appears within the matrix of practices in which we
are engaged. Many increases of absolute speed are of no phenomenological
concern to us, because they are black-boxed within our experience, or occur in
domains of activity where we are not direct actors (for example, the increased
speed of electricity distribution or of weapon launching). Where acceleration
does concern us, our feeling for it depends on at least two things: the
intensity of activity required from us and – depending on the first – the
intensity of others’ interactions with us that result. Since however our
activities are generally meshed together within confined domains of,
‘time–space packing’ () imposes limits upon the resulting
acceleration of interactions, and may act as a break on how much faster
accelerated possibilities for interaction actually feel to social
actors.
While there are
only so many bodies of a certain size that can fit into a finite space – there
are certain natural limits to spatial packing, beyond which the attempt to pack just has to
stop (otherwise, bodies get crushed) – the same is not true in time: there is literally no limit to how many messages, each sent in a
non-synchronous mode, can ‘be there together’ in one’s inbox, each requiring
response ‘now’ across a range of communicative platforms. The situation is very
different with white noise, where countless signals cancel each other out so
that nothing distinct can be heard. The challenge of communication overload is
that each message can be heard – as the carrier of a
distinct meaning – yet it cannot be attended to, since the time required for
doing so is lacking. In this way, contemporary arrangements for communication
tend to generate time-packing demands on
individuals, from moment-to-moment, which along with the related of
communicative obligations they can never, in principle, fulfil.
Such multiple and
impossible demands might not be problematic in ‘thin time’ where there is no
wider normative framework for ordering action-sequences relative to each other.
But they are deeply problematic in ‘thick’ time, or what Robert Hassan () calls ‘network time’, that is, ‘digitally compressed clock-time’ in
which the temporal calibration of obligations within particular figurations is
intensified. The contemporary workplace and the social relations of those
periods of intense change in one’s social networks (such as adolescence or
early adulthood) are likely to be periods of ‘thick time’ when the burden of
communicative obligations left unfulfilled due to time-deficits is felt more
strongly (). Problems of coordination in periods of ‘thick time’
become potential problems for any wider figurational order.
So far our
analysis has been on a general level, but we need to approach these
possibilities also from the perspective of particular practices. A number of
practices (simple and complex) offer entry-points into such transformations.
One practice in
everyday life, which seems to point in the opposite direction from
time-deficits, is ‘time-deepening’. By
referring to time as ‘deep’, we mean here not to assert an actual dimension of
time – time is not literally deep – but rather the experience, generated by the
progressive acceleration of our obligations to interact, of having more to do,
more ways in which we must be ‘adequate’, and more conflict between those
increased obligations and our ability to meet them in the available time.
One digital media
practice relevant here is archiving. We are,
through digital infrastructures, archiving all sorts of information, images and
other traces of
life-processes more easily. As a result, photography becomes embedded as a
social practice in new ways (). The wider implications are complex: greater institutional capacities of memory require improved
means for interpreting and sorting the now vast piles of information that
accumulate. Meanwhile, the difficulty of ruling out the possibility that some
past incident will have been stored in some more or less embarrassing form – so
that it can be released by someone at some future point –
increases the risks for individuals and institutions of managing that
uncertainty.
We may also feel
time-related obligations to each other of a more complex sort. Think of today’s
frequent expectation of individuals that they will keep all channels open
(), already hinted at in the discussion above of the problems of
constant connectivity. We can now, if we wish, be permanently open (and
potentially responsive) to content from all directions. Many writers see the
practice (or even compulsion) of continuous connectivity as characteristic of
the media generation that grew up with digital media (). Enabling us to be open on all
channels in this way is part of the marketing promise of new portable
interfaces such as the smartphone. While it is impossible to be open to
everything, the demand to ‘be available’ shapes an emerging practice that is
different from earlier modes of media consumption based on intermittent
communication and a clear distinction between mass media and interpersonal
media. Keeping all channels open means permanently orienting oneself to the
world beyond one’s private space, and the media circulated within it. It is
against the background of this (previously impossible) standard that some
people seek to limit their openness to
communication, at least for certain purposes
In response to
the new intensity of time-challenges received through media, we are developing
practices of selection: processes by which we peremptorily stop doing certain things we always used to do;
processes by which we drastically select from the
environment with which we must interact in order to make it more manageable.
Sherry Turkle’s striking account () of some of the drastic ways in
which young people select out (de-select) the activity of just talking with
their friends, because of the acute time–space-packing problems they face, is
just one example of how the texture of everyday life may change quite
drastically through indirect pressures of selection. In response to such
pressures, we seek ways of ‘selecting out’ from our communication environment
while maintaining the illusion that we are still fully connected. Selecting out
is increasingly delegated to technological interfaces such as the smartphone,
which offer gateways to media
that are the result of intense prior selection. By choosing from a vast range
of ‘apps’, people screen out much of the infinite media environment and create
a ‘chosen’ interface that is both manageable and seemingly personal: this is
the double level of the ‘media manifold’ in action. There is the potential here
for our experiences to become fragmented,11
but new forms of linking across disparate sites of experience are also
developing. We are now sharing aspects of experience – images of special meals
we have just eaten, selfies that record our presence at a location or with a
person as we travel – in ways we did not do before.
One important
selection practice is ‘hiding out’. ‘Hiding out’ (being online while trying to
disguise this from others, or avoiding using the phone for its primary use,
speaking) is increasingly common in the USA. Sherry Turkle quotes a 21-year-old
college student: ‘I don’t use my phone for calls any more. I don’t have the time to just go on and on’ (). This, as Turkle sees, creates a paradox: infrastructures for
enhancing interpersonal communication, through their built-in tendency to
accelerate interaction, create time-deficits so severe that people have to stop communicating, at least directly (face to face),
deferring ‘full’ communication so as to manage their time-deficit better.
Hiding out then is part of a wider set of ‘practices of demarcation’, where
people mark off space–times when they will not be connected to
certain individuals, collectivities or organizations (): on holidays of course, but also other ‘slots’ in the daily flow of
patterned time (). Such demarcations impose further adjustments
on others: the costs of those adjustments may be absorbed within a wider system
of managing mutual availability, or their disruption may fall unequally on
particular individuals or particular classes.
There is also a
broader point about coordination. The problem is not just one of lacking time
for reaction to communications, but lacking time for interpretation,
that is, for making narrative sense of what one is
supposed to be up-to-date with. The problem may not be amenable to direct
adjustment. We reach here a wider problem of figurational order: of ‘configuration’, as the phenomenological philosopher
Paul Ricoeur put it. In Ricoeur’s work, the relationship between time and
narrative is explicit: ‘narrative’ is only ‘meaningful to the extent that it
portrays the features of temporal experience’, while ‘time’ only ‘becomes human
time to the extent that it is organized after the manner of a narrative’
(). The possibility
of narrative for Ricoeur always requires acts of ‘configuring’, a temporal
synthesis which grasps together a variety of heterogeneous elements. Narrative
offers a different way of being in time, since the plot ‘extracts a
configuration from a [mere] succession’ (), the mere succession
from moment to moment. There is always, for Ricoeur, a paradoxical relation in
human life between the possibility of configuration and the reality of mere
succession.
Ricoeur’s
reflections on time and narrative were developed principally for a
philosophical and literary context: social ordering was not Ricoeur’s priority.
But they remain a useful reference-point for thinking sociologically about our
lived experiences of media and information infrastructures, and in particular
for the problems of ‘configuring’ the much intensified form of these infrastructures
that we now experience: extracting a configuration (of possible narratives)
from an endless stream of mere succession. Ricoeur himself was well aware of
the historicity of the narrative structures within which we
operate:
perhaps, in spite of everything, it is necessary to have confidence in the call for concordance that today still structures the expectations of readers and to believe that new narrative forms, which we do not yet know how to name, are already being born [. . .] For we have no idea of what a culture would be where no one any longer knew what it meant to narrative things. ()
Ricoeur intuits a
future vulnerability of culture with respect to time, which we are only now,
and in particular cultures, beginning to register in practice: the possibility
of a new ‘culture’ which resists narrative
and creates conditions where the configuring of individual experience is only
partly possible.
Problems of
figurational order – or of ‘configuration’ in Ricoeur’s term – through which
the interrelations in which we are enmeshed make sense to us as an order are an expression of the growth of new
figurations, and figurations of figurations, that constitute those
interrelations. And figurational problems felt at the level of individual
actors are a manifestation of the emergence of new forms of generalized order by which the world can be governed in
new ways. We saw in the last chapter how a growing complexity of spatial reach,
made possible by new technologies of transmission, enables new worlds of
interaction, such as the trading floors of global stock markets. In this
chapter’s final section, we explore other ways in which order might be emerging
in time across today’s increasingly densely woven mesh of social figurations.
In thinking
further about figurational order, let’s consider first media-derived
transformations in the social domains of work.
Time is important
for work since ‘work is done in time: it is a temporal act, done by actors’
(). The management of time within the bounded spaces
of organizations is one of the key dimensions and problems of organizational
life (). But work environments may differ markedly in how they
are organized in time. Lee and Sawyer draw a key distinction between
monochronic and polychronic work environments:12
Individuals working polychronically place less value on temporal order, accept events as they arise and are likely to engage in multiple activities simultaneously. In contrast, people working monochronically seek to structure activities and plan for events by allocating specific slots of time to each event’s occurrence. ()
Most organizations,
because they focus on common systems and goals, assume a monochronic way of
working, even if individuals operating within them also operate
polychronically: that intensifies the normalizing pressures of time structures.
Maintaining a common time-environment for working becomes more difficult in
distributed work that, in turn, is facilitated at a general level by
technologies of communication-at-a-distance. Sarker and Sahay () discovered
this when they studied the work of virtual teams developing information
infrastructure projects in the USA and Norway. Their research was focused on
the role of time and space in shaping the practices of individual team members,
and what they found was interesting:
Key problems related to time appear to be arising from mismatches in psychological and social clocks of team-members, complexities in accounting for time zones, negative interpretations of time lapses, and difficulty in comprehending temporally disordered sequences of chat and threaded messages. ()
Such work
involves developing effective forms of coordination and collaboration between
people who may not have worked together before, or even seen each other before. A
particular issue is ‘suspicion’, that is, the ‘difficulty in physically
verifying the actions of remote members’ (). In
response, people may overcompensate, as evidenced by a study of Australian home
workers:
I feel if I don’t answer an email someone thinks I’m purposely ignoring them instead of I haven’t read it yet. It’s a concern and it’s also just how I see myself as a professional. I want people to know I am looking after things. ()
A further problem
is communicative ‘silence’: a time-period without communication in what was
supposed to be continuous communication. People at a distance tend to interpret
communicative silence negatively, as caused by ‘incompetence or a lack of
commitment’, sometimes leading to ‘a breakdown of even functional
relationships’ (). Ways of dealing with this
include minimizing the dependences between locations – scaling back the degree
of collaboration over distance – or developing new norms of communication (for
example, an assumed 24-hour response period). To sum up, ‘while ICTs act as key
enablers of distributed work’ within a technologically mediated space–time,
‘they by themselves do not guarantee “location transparency”’ (). Translocal communication creates complexities of managing the temporal sequence of communications that
may undermine the mutual substitutability of perspectives
that Schutz regarded as necessary for effective social interaction. The
pressures towards reliance on translocal cooperation meanwhile accumulate,
meaning that the costs of such imperfect working conditions, at the individual
level, can be high.
Consider also the
organizations that make the information packages, which form much of the
background of our shared time: the ‘news’. Recent research with major global
news producers shows that a change in the inputs to news is affecting those
producers’ relation to time. Schlesinger and Doyle () argue that, whereas
the temporality of news-making was once clear (focused on ‘breaking news’ and
its onward, outward transmission), a changing economic model has meant that
news producers must increasingly adapt to the inward flow of audience response
and commentary (for example, what is trending on Twitter and Facebook). This
leads, they argue, to real-time adjustments in production routines which
potentially introduce time-conflicts into the practice of news-making
(): do you spend time checking or
identifying a source for a new story, or do you spend time checking social
media reactions to your last story?
Such paradoxes of time-relations through
media affect informal types of work too. Think of those outside conventional
organizations who are trying to change the economic system: protesters for
social change. As anthropologist Veronica Barassi () points out,
protesters, like others, have to deal with ‘the temporality of immediacy’: that
means face-to-face interactions and activities must regularly be interrupted by
incoming electronic messages, and the need to send out new messages. Barassi’s
fundamental point, similar to ours, is that it is ‘through the organization of
our everyday human practices that we construct specific temporalities’ (). It is not just a question of the personal cost of being continuously
available on one’s mobile, but also of the trumping, for
everyone, of certain time-consuming types of activity by others which seem more
‘immediate’. The quality of political practice,
especially practice aimed at producing social change through extensive
deliberation, may thereby be damaged, as this activist interviewed by Barassi
notes: ‘I feel that you cannot create a real discussion [on social media]. The
communication is too fast, there is no depth. It is also difficult to establish
a history of events and thoughts.’ Or as another activist puts it, ‘we need
also to propose our alternatives. The problem is that these complex analyses
need to be developed properly, we need time and space to do
that’ (). Other researchers of social movements note the
cost for activists of being locked into ‘an [accelerating] event-oriented
dynamic’ that focuses on the following up, and responding to, social media
trends (). The apparent obligation to ‘stay connected’
creates hidden time-deficits that, in turn, generate costs for the wider
practices in which actors are engaged, without denying however that digital
media also facilitate practices of memory and archiving in political movements
().
What general
principles can we draw from these disparate cases? First, there is a tendency
for the temporal dynamics of communication
systems to override the temporal dynamics of other processes in
which the actors receiving the outputs of those systems may be involved. Social
media platforms seem to carry their own sense of time and time-related
obligation, as a number of commentators have noted (). Political activists may feel a
pressure to follow only the spikes in social media (what is ‘trending’, for
example, according to Twitter’s algorithms), rather than register a steady
growth in interest in their activities, even though it is the latter that may be more useful and
sustainable (). The fact that
this message is ‘right now’ on one’s phone – and therefore immediately available to be responded to – seems to trump other
possible uses of the time required to respond. There are parallels in the world
of general social interaction: the fact that a message from an assumed close
consociate on the Mixi platform generates a requirement for a young person in
Japan to respond immediately (), rather than perform some other
action. Because responding immediately, while doing many other things, can be
difficult, an overarching requirement may emerge to sustain a state of constant
readiness to respond whenever a message comes in, even
while one is asleep. There is something paradoxical when technological system imperatives, in the temporal mode,
trump other major needs; for example, for continuous periods of
non-responsiveness (usually called ‘sleep’). How system imperatives are
integrated, well or badly, into everyday reality becomes crucial for the
quality of that life.
The problem here
for analysis is arguably more difficult than that of grasping the order of
complex social domains (such as global trading rooms) built on many
interlocking figurations oriented to shared communication and data flows. For
those domains carry their own narratives of order and,
although its reality must be lived by those workers, we can make sense of the
idea that such domains operate within boundaries that sustain their
effectiveness. More difficult to analyse are cases where system imperatives
linked to generalized communications infrastructures bleed out into daily life
for individuals, and where narratives to make sense of the resulting
disruptions are unavailable. This is the largely uncharted area that Elias
captured through his notion of ‘tempo’.
In Elias’ terms,
a dramatic recalibration of the social world’s tempo – considered
from the perspective of some actors relative to others – is under way, and from
the perspective of deep mediatization social media platforms are driving it.
Elias says that ‘tempo’ works as ‘a function situated at a junction of so many
chains of action [which] demands an exact allocation of time; it makes people
accustomed to subordinating momentary inclinations to the overriding
necessities of interdependence; it trains them to eliminate all irregularities
from behaviour and to achieve permanent self-control’ ().
The normative force of tempo doesn’t derive from anyone’s intentions:
it accumulates through interlocking mutual relations of many figurations, and
figurations of figurations, which over time result in what seem to actors to be
‘overriding necessities of interdependence’. The assumed reason for this
‘overriding’ is that cooperation will break down without them. When one type of
call on our time is trumped by another, this has consequences: if this trumping
becomes routine, this may cause us permanently to
direct scarce time away from the uses that have been trumped, opening the gates
to an exponential growth in the time-use that generates the trumping. This is
one important engine for the progressive reshaping of
everyday life in time through media. To the extent that we lack ways
of making sense of this change (of configuring it with
our other ways of making sense of the social world), a problem of figurational
order arises.
Here we see at
work one aspect of deep mediatization that is driven not by any ‘logic’
inherent to media contents or forms, but by the dynamics of the
intensified interdependences of meaning and sociality that media make possible.
Yet this is only one dimension of how social media platforms are working with
deep mediatization. Also important are new modes of evaluating
others, commenting on what they have just said or will shortly
do, imitating others, all of which have temporal aspects,
and so contribute to increased temporal interrelatedness. The possibility that
our relations with time are changing through what we do on digital platforms
has been noticed by various writers (). We are in the middle, potentially, of a major
transformation in social ordering whose outcome will depend on more than
temporal calibration. As Elias understood so well, questions of tempo cannot be
separated from questions of value.
One hundred and
fifty years ago, a speeding up of the movement of bodies and things (railways)
disrupted society’s ‘traditional space–time continuum’ (), leading to the loss of the ‘spatial distance created between localities
[which] was the very essence of their “here and now”, their self-assured and
complacent individuality’ (). It is too early to tell whether the
‘consciousness’ (as Schivelbusch put it) associated with the here and now of
everyday locations, as it was understood before the advent of
continuous and media-based connection, will be lost completely, but we should
not underestimate the convergent forces pointing in that direction.
A banal, indeed
parochial, example can speak to the sort of problems
emerging in many places. In the UK in September 2015 it was reported (Guardian, 4 September) that an unnamed 14-year-old boy
who flirted with a girl by sending her a naked picture of himself is now
recorded in a police crime database, and will remain so for at least a decade.
He sent the image, presumably not thinking of its archived after-life (he might
not have expected
that the recipient would be quick enough to circulate the image on to others).
Nor did he expect the image to come to the notice of a police officer based at
the school who recorded the ‘crime’ in the database, although without making
any charges. The result of this ‘negligence’ (and the original no doubt foolish
and offensive act) is however an ongoing penalty that seems wholly disproportionate.
Something in the figurational order seems out of joint when communicative
practices in space (circulation) and in time (archiving) generate consequences
whose scale is radically at odds with those anticipated by actors themselves.13
An additional
force at work is the huge investments involved in converting the interconnected
space–time of everyday communications into a domain for profit: however uneven
access to communications remains, the push to ‘connect’ a
very large proportion of the world’s population, for example, by cheap ‘smart’
phones or ‘free’ internet provision such as Facebook’s Free Basics platform, is
real.14 As Jose van Dijck
() explains in her masterly survey of the growth of so-called ‘social
media’ platforms, it is impossible to separate this trajectory and its
purported transformation of ‘social life’ from the development of software
which organizes the ‘data’ of our interactions into a space of appearances for us as social users. There would be no ‘social media’ platforms without that process of
organizing data, which is not to deny that data processes in themselves already
have social consequences. One consequence of the embedding of data-based
processes in everyday life may be to shape the reference-points by which we
organize action. Those who design data-processes are particularly interested in
prediction. When the predictive results of such data-gathering are fed back
into our own streams of experience (‘personalized’ adverts,
differentiated prices when we buy something, newsfeeds on our social media
page, prompts to take action, commendations on our Twitter performance), social
actors’ own sense of time – the various linked time-horizons
towards which their actions are oriented – may get changed in the process.
We will return to
these questions of order, and their implications for questions of value, in Chapters 10 and 11. We need however in the next
chapter to consider more closely a theme that has emerged across Chapters 5 and 6: that is, the implications of
‘data’ for phenomenology’s account of how the social world is constructed.
In the two
previous chapters, we have stretched classic phenomenological accounts of the
construction of the social world by attending to the consequences of mediated
communications for the space and time of everyday social interaction. But we
have not so far encountered anything that fundamentally disrupts the approach
to the sociology of knowledge offered by Berger and Luckmann. They understood
social knowledge as built up through the accumulation of ‘ordinary’ members of
society’s knowledge acquired through everyday ‘thoughts and actions’ (). However, we have noted that data-based infrastructures of
computer-mediated communications now play a key role in social interaction and
that this might be shifting how we acquire social knowledge. In
this chapter, we take that issue head on: we will be concerned with the deep
enfolding in everyday life of automated data-gathering and data-processing
which, in their underlying operations, are very far from everyday ‘thought and
action’.
What are the
implications of ‘data’ – as acquired, processed, configured and re-presented by
computer-based systems – for social knowledge? We use the term ‘systems’ here
in a descriptive, not theoretical, sense to refer to configurations of
computing resource that enable the performance of large-scale information
processing, operating to a large extent without direct human intervention,
through ‘automating mediation’ via ‘software agents’ (). We do not intend the word ‘system’ to suggest any allegiance to a theory of ‘social systems’: indeed, we reject any such
theories.1 That definitional
point aside, this chapter is a turning-point in our argument. This is the point
at which a materialist phenomenology starts to diverge substantially from
classic phenomenology. As anticipated in Chapter 1, this is also the point where the apparently
irreversible breach between the phenomenological tradition (once cast in
properly materialist form) and apparently anti-phenomenological (because
materialist) accounts of knowledge such as Foucault’s () can be
repaired.
The strength of
Berger and Luckmann’s work, and the wider tradition of phenomenology, was to move away from
a concern with the social contexts in which ‘ideas’ are generated (a
sociological supplement to traditional ‘history of ideas’) towards an interest
in ‘everything that passes for “knowledge” in society’, that is, with
‘common-sense knowledge’ (). But Berger and Luckmann bracketed out
the question, previously raised by Schutz, of the ‘social distribution of
knowledge’ (), in order to try to develop a ‘single body of
reasoning’ about social knowledge in the style of Talcott Parsons ().
That is why they were comfortable also with bracketing out from their sociology
broader questions of epistemology, as if they had no bearing on everyday life.
Both decisions now seem problematic. The growth of ‘data’ is part of a major re-distribution of knowledge production: any account
today of what we know in the social world must confront a conflict (or at least a plurality) in what
passes for social knowledge and in everyday epistemology. We come face to face
with that plurality every day. This gives a new prominence to the sociology of
knowledge,2 but on terms very
different from those supposed by Berger and Luckmann.
The classic
thesis of the ‘social construction of reality’ assumed that one could build an
account of common-sense knowledge simply by bringing together overlapping
perspectives on how knowledge arises for human actors in their everyday ‘social
contexts’ (). Our thesis in this book – the mediated construction of reality – considers media’s
implications for such an account of common-sense knowledge, but what if the
workings of ‘media’ are not understandable exclusively within our accounts of
particular bounded social contexts? Data’s role in media’s operations pushes us
further in this direction.
‘Data’ is the
symbolic rough material out of which, through processes of accumulation,
sorting and interpretation, ‘information’ is generated for use by particular
actors with particular purposes (). Although, casually, we
talk about ‘raw data’, in reality no data is ‘raw’. ‘Raw data is an oxymoron’
(), which means that data always materializes within a particular practice and
structure of collection: at its simplest, a database. We can leave
the details of that to one side for now. Our point, more basically, is that
‘data’ and ‘information’ generated by systems of computers are today a
precondition for everyday life; the selections from the
wider ‘world’ () made by data processing are consequential for
social life. That much was already grasped by Anthony Giddens in the 1980s
(), although Giddens’ particular
focus was the state’s role in gathering information, not the wider processes of
state and corporate monitoring we see today. Another
pioneering account of the social role of data processing by both markets and
states was James Beniger’s () description of nineteenth-century modernization,
but this did not prioritize phenomenological issues.3
The challenge to
phenomenology from contemporary data practices stems from three developments
subsequent to Giddens’ observations. First, the collection of data is now
continuous in many processes of social action and interaction, generating
volumes of data whose processing is unmanageable without automation. In many
rich countries, basic acts, such as booking a train or plane ticket, or keeping
in touch with friends, now have as their precondition the unimpeded operation
of networked systems of data-gathering and data-processing. Such automated
processes are not a special case, or reserved for large institutions such as
government departments: they are becoming, for many, the general background of everyday life. Second, the
largest proportion of data processing now lies in the hands of the ‘corporate
private sector’ (), that is, organizations whose goals cannot
be equated with the general social interest, since they are aimed at private
competitive advantage. Those goals are necessarily external to the
model of social knowledge developed by classic phenomenology, and there is at
least an attempt to implement them on a global, not merely national or
regional, scale (). Third, the outcomes of such data processing
include the generation, prima facie, of social knowledge itself,
at least in an instrumental sense: information put to use in the management of
social interaction. Social actors are sorted in relation to particular
action-outcomes on the basis of how data relating to them is categorized and
processed. Data processing is, as Oscar Gandy (), a pioneer of its
sociological study, put it, ‘a discriminatory technology’ that works through
‘three integrated functions’: ‘identification’ (the collection of data of
administrative relevance), ‘classification’ (the resulting assignment of
individuals to pre-formulated groups), and ‘assessment’ (the assignment of
individuals to particular action-outcomes based on comparing how they are
classified).
In the term
‘data’ we include all the processes and underlying infrastructures for
gathering, sorting, collecting, evaluating and acting upon data. Data comprise
today a substantial proportion of the ‘socially available stock of knowledge’
(). Data production is inherently asymmetrical, in a way not envisaged in classic
phenomenology’s model of social knowledge: it is oriented to the purposes of
the institutions – private or governmental – that use the data. True,
individual social actors are themselves involved in mutual data-gathering, and
may act in ways
that adapt to data-gathering processes (we return to this), but this does not
change the fact that the primary drivers of data processes as forms of social
knowledge are institutions external to the social interactions in question. A
large proportion of such data is produced automatically, relying on processes
of aggregation and algorithmic calculation that are driven by the needs of
those external institutions. True, we could also argue that the growing
interdependency of everyday life and media technologies (what we have called
deep mediatization) is itself a key driver of data production – at least from
the perspective of today’s version of digital
infrastructure: we can surely imagine other versions that are not dependent on
continuing data-gathering. That would raise wider issues about the particular
types of figurational order that are today becoming dominant, a point to which
we will return in Chapter 10. For now,
we ask only the basic question: what are the consequences of the deep social
embedding of data processing for social phenomenology?
Berger and
Luckmann were right to make explicit a key organizing dynamic in social
experience, that is, how social actors ‘apprehend the reality of everyday life
as an ordered reality’ (). There is still force to
that idea: states of affairs where we cannot apprehend our
everyday reality as ordered are deeply distressing and disruptive of basic
human processes (times of social and civic breakdown, political terror, deep
forms of social victimization). But the issues raised by data-processing already
confront us with conflicts about how reality is
ordered, and what its order is. Schutz saw the ‘how of the
individual situation in the lifeworld’ () as
fundamental to social knowledge, but conflicting accounts of that ‘how’ now
circulate: data processes generate many of those accounts. The economy of data
collection and processing is now a crucial dimension of the wider market
economy, as well as the operations of the state. The collection of data does
not operate through the give-and-take – the mutual acknowledgement – of social
interaction, but rather through processes of automated extraction exterior to
any possible reflexive human action. Social actors may seek sometimes to resist
this, but the resistance can only be partial since so many forms of action seem
to have, as their precondition, such prior processing and the categorizations
on which such processing depends.
As a result, the
two premises of Berger and Luckmann’s phenomenology of the social world are challenged:
first, that ‘everyday life presents itself as a reality interpreted by men [sic] and subjectively meaningful to them as a coherent world’; and, second, that the
world of everyday life is not only taken for granted as reality by the ordinary
members of society, but ‘it is a world that originates in their
thoughts and acts, and is maintained as real by these’
(). We are not arguing that in everyday life social
actors no longer try to generate common-sense knowledge in their thoughts and
acts, just because automated processes of
data-processing are deeply embedded in their daily lives. For sure,
‘common-sense knowledge’ of the social world remains ‘the knowledge shared with
others, the normal, self-evident routines of everyday life’ (). But there are other forms of knowledge of the social
world now in play,4 not always
self-evident to social actors, over which they have no control and yet which impact them deeply, and we need now to integrate this
fact into our understanding of what we do and think every day.5
Berger and
Luckmann were certainly aware of the reliance of social actors on wider
patterns of knowledge and institutional knowledge production. They acknowledged
the role of language in ‘transcending the “here and now”’ (), and
they had an account of how, more widely, institutions work to underwrite the
hierarchy of knowledge that underlies social order, making legitimation not
just a normative but a cognitive fact (). But their account of how
this works fits poorly with the role of automated data processing in everyday
life today. Their examples of the role of ‘system’ in knowledge production were
different in kind from today’s data-processing systems, and much less
consequential for the content of social knowledge: the background role of the
telephone system in everyday transmission of communication, the bureaucracy
that arranges one’s new passport (). Berger and Luckmann simply
could not have anticipated the role of data and information systems in
generating knowledge for contemporary life, that is, their role in
supporting and shaping the ontology of everyday
interaction. For Berger and Luckmann, ‘institutionalization’, though broadly
defined, depends in the end on a fitting together of how human agents themselves act in, and make sense of, the
world: ‘institutionalization occurs whenever there is reciprocal typification
of habitualized actions by types of actors’ (). However bewildering
the scale of such institutional forms of sense-making and knowledge production
may seem to the individual actor, the institutional world that appears to the
individual remains ‘a humanly produced, constructed objectivity’
().
How well does
this account of the sociology of knowledge fit with data’s role in everyday life today? For
sure, our reliance on data in the social world already seems a social necessity. The internet evolved as an
information space connecting, potentially, every computer and computer-based
device on the planet, and every file found there. That huge expansion of scale,
if it is within our cognitive reach, requires automated processes. The infinity
of images and texts, people and events that we now regard as being ‘there for
us’ online could not be ‘there for us’, as human
actors with limited processing capacities, if it were not for the automated
processes of search engines (‘apps’). For this reason, it is important to think
about the wider infrastructure of contemporary communications – including their
data aspects – as a crucial dimension of what Berger and Luckmann call
objectivation whereby ‘the externalized products of human activity attain the
character of objectivity’ (), and so social
reality is constructed. But this ‘objectivation’ operates by rather different
rules from those envisaged by classic phenomenology.6
The problem is
not merely one of increased complexification and delegation. Berger and
Luckmann had already anticipated this, arguing that the resulting pressure
against overarching order was overcome by ‘establishing a stable symbolic
canopy for the whole society’ () which arranged even realities very
distant from social actors’ experience within a relational hierarchy (). Data processes are disruptive not just because they are distant, but
because they involve the unimaginably large-scale and
automated repetition of processes of counting, sorting and
configuring data (generating new forms of cognition). More generally, a large
proportion of what now passes for social knowledge is held not by persons, but
within an impersonal ‘reserve’ of accumulated text and images (the internet)
that is available to us not directly (it is too large for that) but indirectly
via automated search () and automated
processing of other sorts. Under these new conditions, Berger and Luckmann’s
once unobjectionable statement is jarring:
Knowledge of how the socially available stock of knowledge is distributed, at least in outline, is an important element of that same stock of knowledge. I know, at least roughly, what I can hide from whom, who I can turn to for information on what I do not know, and generally which types of individuals may be expected to have which types of knowledge. ()
And yet Berger
and Luckmann remain right when they argue that the pressures for things to hang
together are strong, and the need to optimize the convergence of ‘relevance’ is
high (). The impression of ‘meaningful reciprocity’
() among social actors is still important, even if there can be no
reciprocity (in the sense Berger and Luckmann intended) between humans and the
automated processes which accumulate, count and configure data for and about
them.
What then if
sociology of knowledge acknowledges, in the midst of the social world, other forms (indeed forces) of ‘social’ knowledge than
those generated by social actors? The result need not be ‘reification’, defined
by Berger and Luckmann as the forgetting of the human role in the construction
of reality, so that ‘the objectivated world loses its comprehensibility as a
human enterprise’ (): data processes, after all, are themselves the
mediated result of any number of social, cultural and political processes,
involving humans at some level. But there is something significant in the fact
that ‘data’ involves processes that exceed the direct capacities of human
agents, whether to perform or to model:7
in this sense, data involves a certain kind of materialization (via
media and their infrastructure) that brings, in turn a particular institutionalization of knowledge. The goals, norms and
‘knowledges’ of those processes are necessarily different in kind from those of
human actors. The relations of ‘social’ knowledge therefore to questions of
legitimacy, value and social order become less straightforward than they
appeared to Berger and Luckmann. Let us now attempt to explore this in some
specific areas.
Like all
infrastructures, the infrastructure of ‘data’ sinks inside social
arrangements (): if it did not, it would not be doing
its work of enabling our lives to run their ordinary course. But since the data
infrastructure is a structure for social knowledge, we must
bring it to explicit reflection, if we are to have a satisfactory account of
how the social world is constructed.
The process of
institutionalizing knowledge through data has many components: it operates via
the materialization of a network of networks so complex that it makes no sense
to regard it as animated by one single logic or ‘dominant shaping force’ ().
That said, its point is, so far as possible, to act as
an infrastructure, as a practical system. That, in broad terms, is what someone expects when s/he
trusts our credit card, phone or laptop will work when getting off a plane the
other side of the world, or indeed a train the other side of a country. And
such expectations, on the part of social actors, are inseparable from the goals
of countless businesses to
achieve a seamless plane of interoperability between
their products and services and those of other businesses. Such corporate
ambitions have become unthinkable without data tracking: as Armand Mattelart
puts it, ‘the tracking grid now provides meaning on a planetary scale’
(). The importance of this infrastructure for wider forms
of political and social order is undeniable: ‘technological innovations are
similar to legislative acts or political foundings that establish a framework
for public order [. . .] in tangible arrangements of steel and concrete, wires
and transistors, nuts and bolts’ () – and, we
might now add, code.
Crucial to this
transformation is the database; ‘the ability to order information about
entities into lists using classifications [is] a contemporary key to both state
and scientific power’ (). The database has a distinctive
type of power which Bowker defines as ‘jussive’, an ordering power based on an
‘exclusionary principle’ that determines what can and cannot be stored in a
particular form (). The consequences of database operations are in
this sense final: ‘what is not classified gets rendered invisible’ (). The point of database operations is to fix the starting-point
(the base) from which data operations – counting, aggregating, sorting,
evaluation – begin. In that sense, by being placed in a database, ‘data’
becomes ‘unmoored’ from the underlying materials from which it was gathered
(). It makes no difference to this process that some of the
processes developed on the base of the underlying data architecture may themselves
go on adapting in response to emerging patterns in data, provided the structure
of the underlying database remains the same.8
Such adaptations are in any case driven not by some independent ‘will’ present
in the processes from which data are gathered but by the emergence of features
that, from the perspective of the data process, are defined as significant
enough to trigger such adaptations. In all such cases, the ‘knowledge’ that is
produced cannot be separated from the purposive selections out of which the
database is formed, or subsequently adapted. Insofar as the outcomes are
treated as direct knowledge about the processes re-presented by
the data, they are misleading. As Bowker put it, ‘our memory practices [are]
the site where ideology and knowledge fuse’ (). We have already in Chapter 3 suggested that these
developments can be seen as a potential new fourth wave of mediatization,
through which our interdependencies progressively deepen through
infrastructures for
the continuous production and exchange of data: the
emerging wave of datafication, within the wider wave of digitalization.
Most data
involved in the organization of social life are ‘made from the raw material of
human experience’ () and used for social classification. The purpose of data-gathering is not
neutral, but precisely discriminatory, that is, ‘to coordinate and control
[people’s] access to the goods and services that define life in the modern
capitalist economy’ (). This discrimination requires a
massive pooling of computational resources: a single database is not
sufficient. It is essential to aggregate separate databases into massively
larger ones, enabling the matching of patterns across countless sites of data
collection, from which predictions can be made (). From
the development of ‘distributed relational databases’ in the 1990s and 2000s to
the work of today’s growing data sector, including global businesses on the
scale of Google, Expedia, Acxiom (), the aggregation-for-value of data originally collected from specific
locations and in specific contexts now comprises a basic fact of social life.
It is naive to
ignore the consequences that the principles of selection underlying such
data-gathering may have for particular distributions of power, and for the
long-term organization of the social world. As Theodore Porter put it in a
broader context, ‘quantification is a technology of distance’, motivated not by
a ‘truth to nature’ but by ‘the exclusion of judgement’ () that
makes particular types of judgement possible and efficient through a reshaping
of the social world itself: ‘the quantitative technologies used to investigate
social and economic life work best if the world they aim to describe can be remade in their image’ (). Indeed, because large-scale institutions necessarily act at a
great distance from the realities they seek to influence, the operation of data
processes plays a crucial role in making a distant,
intractable ‘world’ into an ordered, calibrated reality
that can be interpreted and governed: as anthropologist James Scott put it,
‘legibility’ [. . .]. is a central problem in statecraft’, requiring a
‘politics of measurement’ (). But, as some legal theorists have
noted, we must extend this analysis to the whole surveillance apparatus of the
contemporary commercial and information technology environment ().
We miss the social
form of this complex process, unless we connect up the abstractions inherent in
data functions to the experiential processes in which
those functions have become embedded (), and so register the
potential violence of data-based ‘processes of [. . .] representation and
classification’ (). For this, phenomenological reference-points are essential.9 But a core feature of
data infrastructures is deeply at odds with the assumptions of classic
phenomenology. That is its opacity:10 ‘the configuration
of networked space [. . .] is increasingly opaque to its users’ (). Data’s continuous processes of selection and comparison have a
generalizing force across an infinite domain that guarantees a larger asymmetry
in social knowledge. As Christine Alaimo and Jannis
Kallinikos () put it, ‘it is exactly because of the abstract
nature of data and the simplicity of the logic of encoding that the social can
be represented in all of its (now compatible) highly pliable forms [. . .] Once the social gets engraved into data, it ceases to be related
to established categories and habits. It is transposed onto and thus
enacted according to the very same logic’ by which it was generated. Or, as
Jose van Dijck put it more succinctly, ‘it is easier to encode sociality into
algorithms than to decode algorithms back into social action’ ().
The translation of social life into ‘data’ therefore casts a large shadow: the
domain of descriptors that fail to get captured
by data processes ().
The result is a
change – a potentially profound change – in our relations to infrastructure.
Infrastructures are, at root, tools for human action, operating at the highest
level of complexity, a black-boxed substrate of ‘ordinary’ human action. In the
digital world, our infrastructural tools (for example, our pages on a social
media platform) are increasingly entangled in powerful and distant processes, which we cannot unpick or challenge.
All tools involve mechanisms whose details we forget when we use them, or
perhaps never knew: we may guess how a hammer has been put together, even if
most know little about how the modern car is constructed, yet both hammer and
car are tools of everyday living and our ignorance of their workings (their
black-boxedness) is not crucial to the quality of our use. But many of today’s
‘digital tools’, as we use them, are black-boxes of a different sort,
black-boxes that are also in the act of using us.11 They track our
actions algorithmically, not to enable the tool to work better for us, but to
generate data for the toolmaker’s use: that is, to enable
us to be better targeted by advertisers and marketers (). This is
indeed the very rationale of the much-hyped ‘Internet of Things’, yet its
transformation of our usual relations to infrastructure seems not to have been
noticed.
The result is a
social relationship to abstraction very different from that envisaged by
Schutz. Schutz saw artefacts as comprising the extreme end of the spectrum of
ways in which humans typify (abstract from) their world (). But today’s data-based artefacts now
themselves operate to typify humans mostly for commercial
ends and surveillance, to construct a seamless world for commerce and control.
We might call this tool reversibility. Tool reversibility is not
immediately apparent when we use data-based tools, but it becomes apparent
through our practices of use and the obstructions those practices encounter:
whevever we use a data-based tool, it is already using us. This is one of the
deeper cultural and social implications of the embedding of algorithms in
everyday life ().
Data processes
rely, in turn, on categorization. Categories have been important in social
theory for more than a century. For Durkheim and Mauss (),
categories (as outputs of a system of classification in so-called ‘primitive
societies’) were derivatives of the actual divisions of society itself, and of
the very idea of society itself. In most subsequent accounts, the order of
causality is reversed with categories contributing to ‘the built information
environment of a society’ (): ‘typification’ playing
a similar role in classic phenomenology. But to grasp the degree of abstraction
involved in data-based categories, we need to look more specifically at their
features.
As David Berry
explains, no process of computer-based categorization (and so no sorting,
combination or evaluation based on it) can operate unless an ‘object’ has been
created: ‘in cutting up the world in this pattern, information about the world
necessarily has to be discarded in order to store a representation within the
computer [. . .] those subtractive methods of understanding reality [. . .]
produce new knowledges and methods for the control of reality’ (). So, in order to compose the objects in a
database, such abstraction, first, needs to have occurred. As already noted,
there is no raw data, but only ‘data [. . .] produced through measuring,
abstracting and generalizing techniques that have been conceived to perform a
task’ (). Second, where large numbers of objects are to be
processed by automated functions or algorithms, processing requires prior
organization, the design of a database structure ‘to
extract the data located in them as rapidly and as effectively as possible’; in
this sense, ‘a data structure forms a sort of intermediate level, an
abstraction mechanism, in the process of addressing machine memory’ (). Third, the more complex the operations to be
completed, the greater the need to combine data levels
and so enable more complex processing, what Fuller and Goffey call ‘abstraction
layers’: ‘the more that different functions of a process [. . .] or software
can be integrated by one layer of implementation, the wider it circulates and coalesces. The more
generality an abstraction is capable of, the greater its degree of usefulness;
and the greater its tenacity in self-stabilization, the more activity is
arrayed around it’ (). In this way, more and more of what was
once heterogeneous information can be processed together, but at the price of
ever-greater levels of abstraction. Fourth, the processes of calculation performed on data must be automated through
the use of algorithms. Algorithms are often identified, casually, with the whole
process of data-based transformation of everyday experience, but as ‘encoded
processes for transforming input data into a desired output, based on specified
calculations’ (), algorithms are merely one of many
elements in a sequence of progressive abstraction, if an essential one.
Alongside the
relations between data processes (involving categories that do social work), we
also need to consider what happens when the outputs of those data processes are
played back to social actors. That they are played back
() is another factor, which a sociology of
knowledge that takes data seriously must grasp. Categorization12 is fundamental to
all forms of organization, including social organization. Without it, effective
(or at least non-random) interaction with the world would be impossible. Yet in
the social realm, categorization has a distinctive feature neglected in
phenomenology’s account of typification and not even conceivable in Durkheim
and Mauss’s society-driven model. As Ian Hacking pointed out, classifications
of human objects are ‘interactive’ in a way that, arguably, classifications of
non-human objects are not:13
Ways of classifying human beings interact with the human beings who are classified. [. . .] classifications do not exist only in the empty space of language but in institutions, practices, material interactions with things and other people [. . .]. people are aware of what is said about them, thought about them, done to them. They think about and conceptualize themselves. Inanimate things are, by definition, not aware of themselves in the same way. ()
Hacking’s insight
has particular importance for the digital age when actors and actions are
relentlessly categorized in countless ways for various purposes.
Our ways of
interacting with categories are not easy to disentangle. They occur not
randomly but in a highly structured context linked to the purpose for which
data is being gathered in the first place. The simplest example is the social
media platform. As Daniel Neyland notes, algorithms do not have a simple or
automatic recursive effect on the social world, but involve a ‘configuration through which
users and/or clients are modelled and then encouraged to take up various
positions in relation to the algorithm at work’ (). What
is striking about the configurations of social media platforms is that we act
on and through them, largely as if there were no such
configuration: indeed the very idea of ‘platform’ is a constructed space where
the interface between everyday interaction and commercial transaction appears natural, a seamless dataflow ().
Through our underlying desire to maintain our social commitments across the
newly configured spaces where they seem to migrate, there emerges a ‘growing social commitment to functionality’ (Plantin, Sandvig
et al., forthcoming). This has major implications for how the social world is
constructed.
There are at
least five fundamental ways in which data abstracted from social experience can
translate into frameworks for social practice. These connect with the
dimensions in terms of which the other chapters of Parts II and III are organized.
The first relates
to the organization of space.14
As Kitchin and Dodge () analyse extensively, many spaces (physical,
organizational, informational) are now ‘coded’. Their operations are structured
through the software that processes data inputs of various sorts: the highly
controlled space of the airport security queue is one clear example (), entry into which is
impossible without having met various data-related conditions in a prescribed
sequence. This is an aspect of the rise, more generally, of the automated
management of social processes. Unlike traditional surveillance, this form of
control allows no gaps, since it operates through ‘a grammar of action’, that
is, ‘a systematic means of representing aspects of the world [. . .] and an
organized language for processing those representations’ (). Under these conditions, the spaces Kitchin
and Dodge call ‘code/spaces’ are figurations (in our
term) of a particular, highly organized sort, driven by today’s complex forms
of interdependency.15 Social media
platforms feel like ‘spaces’ where, quite simply, we encounter
others, but their existence is shaped by the underlying operation of platform
software and its calculative infrastructure. Insofar as they create publics,
these are ‘calculative publics’ (), not that
calculability itself is new: Weber () already saw this a century
ago as ‘the peculiarity of modern culture’, but it has a constitutive role today that is unprecedented.
A related point can be made about the time of online media. Online media encourage us to
operate in a distinctive time of required reactions related to the ‘expected’
rhythms of platform interaction: the Facebook timeline, the Twitter hashtag
stream (). This time is not natural but the result of
configuring time-sequenced data in a particular array designed to
stimulate ever more interaction. We relate to this array as if it were a
natural production by the human parties involved in the exchange, yet without
the data-based presentation of the platform, there would be no mutual
orientation in space–time, and so no ‘interaction’. Many platform devices (such
as email reminders) are designed to train people to rejoin the flow of what has
been called ‘social media time’ (), should they slip
out of it. This helps stabilize new data-based figurations that can function as
‘social metronomes’ ().
The third
translation operates at the level of the self. Each of us is
familiar with the need to operate as a self under various descriptions:
difficulties arise when contradictory descriptions of ourselves converge on a
single interaction, and this much is familiar from social phenomenology.
Unfamiliar from that classic work is the idea that each of us has not just a
self-based identity (vis-à-vis the state or corporation
with which we must deal), but a constantly updated ‘data double’ that is the
resultant of the vast data stream that each of us generates continuously across
various sites of data-tracking ().
The ‘data double’, with its built-in relation to multiple interdependent
systems of data capture, depends entirely on the ‘standardizing [of]
classification systems so that they are comparable and databases can be joined
up’ (). It poses sometimes difficult challenges for
individuals whose overall data stream may generate undesired or conflicting
data, and, as already noted, the ‘data double’ is cut off from the shadow body
of data that does not – perhaps cannot – feed into the relevant processes of
calculation ().16
The fourth
translation operates at the level of collectivities. Data
classifies, and so data processes not only work to specify individuals
uniquely, but also generate countless groupings to which individuals are
treated as belonging ().
Whether these groupings correspond to anything that might be recognized by
social actors as collectivities outside the process of data generation is an
open question, but we are familiar with cases where the insistent use of data
labels generates a type of action. Think of Facebook ‘friends’: some of these
will have been friends before but many others are likely to be those one has acquired
through the practice of receiving and making friend requests on the platform.
As Taina Bucher puts it, ‘friends have become a primary means through which the production and occlusion of information can be
programmed’ (). In everyday actions and adjustments, actors
become attuned to maximize such data-based groups (another example would be
numbers of Twitter followers). Collectivities are sites where, through data
processes, new norms of action and reaction emerge. We already know however
that data processes are creating new entities for governments and civil society
actors to deal with. So when, during Brazil’s Junior Masterchef competition in
October 2015, offensive and abusive sexual comments emerged online about a
12-yearold girl contestant, an NGO worker created a hashtag #primeiroassédio,
which quickly generated more than 80,000 similar stories across multiple
platforms (). The importance of open hashtags as attractors to form
political action has been noted for a number of major global protests, for
example the rise of the 15-M and indignados movements in Spain in 2011
().
The final
translation operates at the level of organizations and order
and flows directly from the third. A problem for governments and corporations
from the vast proliferation of continuous data streams is monitoring what
counts as ‘risk’. According to geographer Louise Amoore, governments are
increasingly relying not on judgement or deliberation (no longer possible
perhaps in the face of such a vast mountain of ‘information’) but on an
‘ontology of association’ that ‘draw[s] into association an amalgamation of
disaggregated data, inferring across the gaps [. . .] to derive a new form of
data derivative’ (). According to Amoore, this new ‘politics of
possibility’ involves a fundamental abstraction operating on the flow of time
itself: it is oriented to the predicted future, to ‘a population yet
to come’. ‘Data’ must be rendered ‘actionable’ (), which means
selecting and excluding, ‘rul[ing] out, render[ing] invisible, other potential
futures’ (). These practices of exclusion become the basis for
governing and ordering whole territories, a point to which we return in Chapter 10.
In all these
ways, the domains of the social world, their practices and knowledge are
reconfigured, in part, through processes of categorization based on data. The
distributed complexity of these processes is a key contemporary example of the
figurations of figurations and other large-scale relations between figurations
that we argued a materialist phenomenology must understand. The emerging
figurational order that results from this transforms the basis on which, in
specific social domains such as the family and school, we are bound into
figurations of interaction. It also operates, potentially, to change the very stuff of the
social domain that powerful actors such as governments see themselves as acting upon. In the next section, we consider some
implications of this for how individuals and collectivities act in the social
world.
Online media
present us with appearances which are highly consequential and with which we
spend increasing amounts of our time. But these appearances are not ‘social
facts’ in Durkheim’s sense, emerging from the flow of interpersonal
interactions: rather, they are shaped, at least in part, by the economic and
other external imperatives of the platforms through which they appear. When
involved in online media, we interact on the basis of habits adapted to these
platforms with others whose habits are similarly adapted. This is different
from the entanglement people have always had with objects and infrastructures,
and for two basic reasons. First, because, being rooted in everyday sociality
and knowledge, online media comprise a space governed by norms, including expectations of legitimacy (). Second, because those norms emerge in relation to actions shaped
by particular infrastructures of interaction and exchange, infrastructures
already motivated by the corporate goals to produce and stimulate certain types of effects. This is not, of
course, to deny agency, but simply to emphasize that, when we consider how we
are in the world ‘with’ data, the ‘facts’ of what we do online, like all
datafied ‘facts’, must be weighed carefully by reference to the motivated
context in which they occur (): the goal of measuring
what goes on in any online context as data for
evaluation, and the constant stimulation of performance that yields more such data for measurement. You do not have to have
been active for long on a platform such as Twitter to understand what Burrows
and Savage () mean by the ‘metricization of social life’.
Although online
platforms themselves direct surveillance, the new monitoring affordances of
digital communication technologies involve us all: from the basic question
(‘why hasn’t s/he texted yet?’), to Googling others before we meet them, to
more persistent forms of mutual monitoring, via multiple forms of ‘social
media’ which include not only social networking sites, but also sites for
posting ‘user-generated content’, ‘trading and marketing sites’, and ‘play and game sites’.17 For that reason,
legal theorist Helen Nissenbaum avoids the term ‘surveillance’ because of its
strong pejorative associations with the state, and proposes the more open term
‘monitoring’ (). Indeed the ‘digital trail’ is a major factor in the
life of children, who in a country such as the USA are subject to continuous
monitoring by their parents (). Self-monitoring and self-tracking
() is another important part of the picture,
sometimes with specific goals (a sick person willingly accepting a measuring
device that can warn a local hospital of symptoms of an impending heart
attack), but often for more diffuse purposes. Emerging here in everyday
practice is what Jose van Dijck calls ‘the ideology of dataism [. . .] a
widespread belief in the objective quantification and potential tracking of
human behaviour and sociality through online media technologies’ ().
In some institutionalized fields such as health, practices of continuous
monitoring are a new and urgent trend; in others, like education, they build on
decades of increased measurement and surveillance in schools (). Indeed a consequence of the increasing capacity to combine vast
database networks with huge calculative power is that ‘the more data there is,
the less any of it can be said to be private, since the richness of that data
makes pinpointing people “‘algo-rithmically possible”’ ().
The result over time may be a certain fatalism. We may come to accept a social
world characterized by continuous and enhanced mutual monitoring as our starting-point for thinking about the social. If so,
this is a new and clear example of what we have called deep mediatization.
Berger and
Luckmann’s principle that ‘human “knowledge” is developed, transmitted and
maintained in social situations’ () – that is,
situations where human beings, by virtue of their mutual dependence on shared
resources, must come together to act and think –
now carries a very different implication. The wave of digitalization (Chapter 3) has created a continuous
plane of interaction based in technologies of mediated communication where, in
principle, any actor, wherever located, can reach, and be reached by, the
communications of any other. The temporality of social situations (Chapter 6) has also been transformed
in more subtle ways, giving access to aspects of the flow of daily life that
were previously lost, once experienced. The resulting enrichment of experience
is inseparable from a new degree of institutionalization of social
form. As Jose van Dijck () puts it:
‘through social media, these casual speech acts [of previous everyday life]
have turned into formalized inscriptions
which, once embedded in the larger economy of wider publics, take on a
different value’. Let us think a little more about the implications of this.
Social
situations, through their increasing involvement in ecologies of measurement
and counting, are deeply implicated in data’s status as a source of economic
value. While many aspects of the metricization of social space are hidden to
social actors, this cannot stop data-processing becoming entangled in the
emotions of everyday life: ‘more than mere tools, algorithms are also
stabilizers of trust, practical and symbolic assurances that their evaluations
are fair and accurate, and free from subjectivity,error, or attempted
influence’ (). Translated into the language of classic
phenomenology, algorithms and other aspects of the data infrastructure become a
form of ‘objectivation’, part of ‘the process by which the externalized
products of human activity attain the character of objectivity’ (). That is why an exposé of the searcher-sensitive
features of the search engine results in which we trust is shocking ().
For Berger and
Luckmann, institutionalization depended on ‘the generality of the relevance
structures’ achieved in the production of knowledge (). The
interoperable metricized space of social media platforms and online interaction
generally are coming to comprise, with little resistance, a new structure for
generating social knowledge. According to a recent survey, of the US parents
who use social media, 75 per cent go there for advice about how to solve parenting
problems (). Put another way, in the language of US
pragmatism, the ‘generalized other’ () that regulates social
action is now increasingly sustained by a commercially encouraged flow of
online exchange. Gillespie notes that ‘algorithms impinge on how people seek
information,how they perceive and think about the contours of knowledge, and
how they understand themselves in and through public discourse’ ().
If the algorithms associated with particular platforms, sites and practices
have acquired legitimacy, anyone and any organization that depends for its
power on legitimacy must deal with the consequences of ‘what appears’ somewhere in the unbounded, linked space of the
internet. The management of this ‘new visibility’ () becomes an all-consuming challenge,
creating new challenges for the self: ‘being spotted “by accident” against
one’s will is not
an option; missing out on purposeful display becomes a predicament’ ().
An interesting
example in the private corporate sector is the transformation of the
hospitality industry, and its relations with customers and employees, through
data-based systems for collecting customer reactions. As Orlikowski and Scott
() note, the force of platforms such as
TripAdvisor (popular at the time of writing) is striking. In an industry whose
principal asset is customer anticipation of a good service, a new mechanism of
legitimacy in the ‘space of appearances’ is a profound shift, especially when
the results of such recommendations are now distributed ever more efficiently
as data within the corporate sector (). For political
organizations that must sustain legitimacy through a narrative of control of
their past but also their ability to manage a whole society’s future, the
dynamics of legitimacy and information are even more complex ().
New forms of interdependency are emerging here, based not on digitalization but
on datafication, and the link of datafication to categorization. ‘People put
things into categories and learn from those categories how to behave’ (). Whether or not social actors are aware of the many
levels of data processing that work to shape their contexts of action, they
interact with data-based contexts such as social media platforms as if they were sites for social categorization and
normalization.
It might seem,
therefore, as if a hurricane is blowing through the domains of the social world
and our knowledge of them, threatening to overturn every reference-point and
previously bounded context of knowledge production. Two important factors
constrain this chaos, although they do not in the process protect the social
from datafication, and from the potential normative problems that it generates.
First, there is the stabilizing force that, as Berger and Luckmann put it,
‘institutions do tend to “hang together”’ (): meanings or (as they
put it) ‘relevances’ overlap between contexts and institutional settings,
constraining divergent interpretation, establishing norms of comparison, and
(we would add) generating criteria for ensuring things do not appear. Arguably, this will work to entrench
processes of datafication into social reality through
a contemporary version of the circular feedback between structuring forces and
structured outcomes that Bourdieu called ‘habitus’.18
Second, there is the ongoing and irreducible tension between the grain of
social experience and the forms in which it appears online. Social actors are
likely to devote increasing efforts to contesting this tension with varying
degrees of success.19 We return to the
implications of these struggles for social order in Chapter 10.
If we take
seriously the possibility that the automated digital tools that measure
behaviour and activity online are now a key part of everyday life’s background,
then phenomenology has been complicated irreversibly. A materialist
phenomenology must register how everyday actors are involved in bringing the
workings of those tools into their everyday awareness. All are processes of
categorization. As Bowker and Star note, categories create a ‘social and moral
order’ (), but in the case of data-related categories, it is unlikely
to go uncontested.
The figurations
of figurations that make up the distributed data industries and the domains
that rely upon them are transforming the space of social action. In this
chapter, we have given key emphasis to the role of data in social media
platforms. There is a reason for this: this is precisely where the process of
constructing social reality is remoulded in
detailed forms. As Kallinikos and Constantiou () say, ‘social media
platforms elaborate architectural arrangements through which communal
interaction and daily living are transformed into data ready to enter the
circuits of calculation and so-called personalization’. But social media
platforms are only one area where data processes are becoming deeply embedded
in the building-blocks of social action. Others are the growth of
data-generating ‘wearable’ devices in the health sector, and this is just part
of the wider ‘Internet of Things’, whose consequences for the texture of the
social world are, at this point, uncertain.
We can put all
this in a broader philosophical perspective. The philosopher John McDowell
() considers how our ‘mindedness’ (our unfolding conscious relation
to the world as human beings) becomes embodied in forms of interaction and
resource, as part of what he calls our ‘second nature’ (the evolving set of
social institutions which humans are disposed to develop alongside their first,
biological ‘nature’). For McDowell, the forms that embody the ‘possibility of
an orientation to the world’ have a history (),20 and this history is
constantly open to revision. This formulation enables us to frame with
particular clarity the problem that data pose for the social world as conceived
by classic phenomenology.
Berger and
Luckmann assume that the forms of our ‘mindedness’ evolve only from the accumulation of sense-making by human social actors, but what if today there is an alternative ‘embodiment of mindedness’ ()? What if ‘data’, in all their direct and indirect forms, are being
installed as an alternative and exterior
cognitive infrastructure
through which not only do we become minded,
but the world becomes mindful of us, and everything we
do? Since the data processes discussed in this chapter are part of an informational
infrastructure that is being spread globally at huge speed, this amounts to a
further stage in the deepening of mediatization. The very scale and scope
depends upon the delegation of knowledge generation
and knowledge application to automated processes. Once delegated, those
processes become exterior to the process of social knowledge as classical
phenomenology conceived it: they become what we might call, building on
McDowell, a ‘third nature’, driven by the economic imperatives of
the data industries and all the wider goals of capitalist expansion that, in
turn, drive those industries. This ‘third nature’, if it is to order social
life, requires social actors to adapt to it in a process that, following
Agamben (), we can call ‘subjectification’: the production of
entities that can function as subjects within
this new type of social order. One achievement of materialist phenomenology is
to remind us that we are those entities – unless, that
is, we refuse to be.
In sum, in the
wave of datafication, new means for producing social knowledge have emerged
with two key features. First, they produce ostensibly social knowledge through
automation that is necessarily exterior to everyday processes of human
sense-making. Second, they are oriented to goals, driven by wider economic
forces, that are different in type from the goals that embodied actors are able
to have, unless, that is, they give up on their autonomy entirely. The result
is the emergence, unevenly at this stage, of a new kind of sociality – call it
‘computed’ or ‘platformed’ () – that changes the starting-points for everyday reflexivity and sociological
reflection. Social order (which classic social phenomenology set out to explain)
is now, through its very conditions of formation, inhabited by a form of
already ‘rationalized reason’ (),21 which cannot be
comfortably integrated into the reflection of individual social actors.
Positive readings of this world () are possible, but they cannot cover over
the fissure developing within the production of social knowledge itself. Not surprisingly,
in response, some call for the ‘right to disconnect’.22 The only repairs to
this fissure must lie in the agency of social life on various levels, to which
we turn in Part III.
See our discussion in Chapter 1. As noted in an authoritative recent essay on
algorithms (). See especially Beniger (), where he
remarkably anticipated the connective space of the contemporary internet as a
process of ‘digitalization’. Savage and Burrows () and Burrows and Savage
() have alerted sociologists to the emergence of new forms of data-based
social knowledge, but their interest is the implications for the methods and
goals of professional sociologists. Here we are concerned with the implications
for social actors themselves, and for the domain of
everyday action that classic phenomenology claims to map. For an anticipation of the argument that follows,
see Calhoun (). Calhoun’s
reference is not Schutz, but the US pragmatist Cooley. Calhoun extends Cooley’s
account of social relations (in terms of primary, i.e. rolebased, and
secondary, that is, whole-person-based, relations) to include in the later
twentieth century not just ‘tertiary’ relations (known relations that we have
with distant infrastructure), but also, most relevantly, ‘quaternary relations’
() which operate automatically
without social actors’ awareness, including processes of information processing.
We are well aware that, by considering this
infrastructure from the perspective of (some extension of ) classic
phenomenology, we already fly in the face of those who argue that the only
starting-point for sociological or social-theoretical analysis today is an
already fused process of ‘sociomateriality’. Yet, as discussed in Part I, our
version of social construction takes for granted the mutual imbrication of
social and material and the mutual intertwining of human and material
(). So too did Elias’ (and Schutz’s) and, less
emphatically, Berger and Luckmann’s approaches. But to go further and argue
that our starting-point should be ‘not tasks undertaken by people in roles but
material-discursive practices enacted through apparatus
that simultaneously constitute and organize phenomena’
() is in our
view unhelpful. Nor do we find helpful approaches to ‘socio-materiality’
inspired by a reading of scientific domains such as quantum mechanics that, by
definition, are remote from the conditions of everyday sense-making (). As Jonathan Sterne notes, the
endless debate between ‘materiality’ and ‘constructivism’ has become
‘unproductive’, once we acknowledge that, in researching technologies of
communication, we are interested, always, in processes
which ‘aren’t simply material, but have irreducibly material dimensions’ (). But that is exactly the interest of a materialist phenomenology.
There is an excess too built into code, as software
studies note: ‘in saying something, code also does something, but never exactly
what it says’ (); ‘encoded material enactments
translate/extend agency, but never exactly’ (). For the distinction between database and algorithm,
and the different levels on which they act, see Manovich (),
Gillespie (), Kallinikos and Constantiou (). Cohen () describes her approach as
‘postphenomenological’, because it insists on attending to our relations to
technology, while still drawing on phenomenology. Properly developed however,
as we have argued throughout, a phenomenological perspective must already address our relations to technology.
Again, classic phenomenology raised the question of
opacity of the social world, but saw it as a feature of the relative degrees of
social knowledge, and
our shared lack of knowledge about the future (). For Schutz, there is here no unresolvable problem: ‘the life-world is
experienced as only relatively [. . .] intransparent, but in principle
transparent’ (). Data processes, arguably, however, create a world
which is in principle and always already opaque. This is the force of Frank Pasquale’s critique of
the ‘black-box society’ (). Isin and Ruppert () prefer the term
‘closings’ to encompass the acts of categorization and sorting, but also a
range of other acts that limit possibilities of interpretation. We prefer the
term ‘categorization’ because of its link directly back to social theory.
Some challenge the idea that the classification of
non-human objects is non-interactive (), but that is not our
concern here. See also our discussion in Chapter 5.3. What Kitchin and Dodge call ‘an ongoing relational
problem’ (). Compare Mejias () on how, in general, networks,
as structures of nodes, exclude by definition the ‘paranodal’, that is, the
not-networked, not-sorted domain that lies ‘to the side of ’ nodes and so ‘to
the side of ’ network flows. The typology is drawn from van Dijck ().
See Papacharissi () from whom we
take the interesting reworking of the habitus concept for the age of
datafication. This is the area of ‘social analytics’ on which one
of us has written (): that is, the study
of how social actors make use, and reflect upon, data-driven measurements of
their own practice to better fulfil their own social ends, possibly drawing on
values other than those linked to datafication. For a somewhat similar topic,
see Nafus and Sherman () and Knapp (forthcoming). See also Chapter 1’s conclusion. J. M. Bernstein () offers an interesting
reading of McDowell which places the latter’s fiercely abstract work in the
context of critical theory and particularly Adorno’s account of the
disenchantment of reason. Evgeny Morozov writes: ‘the only autonomy that will
be worth fighting for will be one which flourishes in opacity, ignorance, and
disconnection’ (). This basic idea was already anticipated
by Gilles Deleuze a quarter of a century earlier: ‘the key thing may be to
create vacuoles of noncommunication, circuit-breakers, so we can elude control’
().
Our previous
chapters have laid the foundations for exploring more broadly how agency in the
social world is changing. This is the theme of Part III. But why start this section on agency with a
chapter on the self ? Because we look out on the social as selves: to focus on
how we do so is as good a place as any to grasp how the construction of the
social world is now enacted in various forms of agency, and how that agency is
being transformed by media and communications, including data processes.
Indeed, in the
twenty-first century’s second decade, the change in how social knowledge is
produced, discussed in Chapter 7, has
generated a different role for the self,
resulting in new mechanisms of socialization. The connected space of the web
moved in the mid 2000s from being a domain of static websites to being a tissue
of platforms () that invite, even require, the active input of individuals, datafied individuals. The past
ten years, as part of the emergence of a new wave of datafication within the
overall wave of digitalization, have seen a change in the basic conditions for any social actor to exist as such: the self is expected in many societies to be
available for interaction through digital platforms and even feels a certain
pressure to represent itself on these platforms in the ‘culture of
connectivity’ ().
Anything less
than performing itself in the connected, archived space of
the web amounts, it seems, to a failure of the self. Mobile phones provide a
basic example. Not only is mobile phone usage almost universal in most
countries across the world, but using one’s mobile phone not for ‘phoning’
(speaking) but for connection to online networks of peers (‘social media’) is
becoming a dominant usage, as corporations push to expand smartphone usage. One
respondent to a multi-country survey of university students said, ‘I constantly
check my phone for messages even though it does not ring or vibrate [. . .] I
cannot help it. I do it all the time every day’ (). Media have consequences for more strategic types of self-performance too,
for example attempts to find employment. As a South African university careers guide puts
it: ‘have a personality: use different platforms to show
different aspects of your personality’.1
The result is to implicate the self’s performance in processes of the
operations of social media platforms (another example of deep mediatization).
The same careers
guide goes on: ‘But don’t overshare.’ In a world where selves are required to manage themselves online – yet who knows where, or
when, your online profile or online activities will get picked up and
evaluated, and by whom? – the self faces new types of risk and opportunity. The risks are not so
much being too generous or too friendly, but rather (in management terms)
failing to calibrate well the optimal balance between ‘self-sharing’ (for
presentational benefit) and ‘self-exposure’ (exposing aspects of the self to
unknown others with risks that cannot be calculated). Selves have always faced
risks in the act of presenting themselves, as they moved from one encounter to
the next. ‘Face work’ is an ongoing challenge of human life in a complex social
space (). But the massively increased
interconnectivity of the internet transforms such risks into features of a
continuous space–time without reliable or complete boundaries. The opportunities are the new possibilities of organizing
our lives as selves through media technologies, through digital devices that
help the self cope better with the multiple expectations of contemporary life
and new possibilities of self-representation, of which the ‘selfie’ is only one
recent example (). And at a basic level, the individual
simply has a greater scale of action across space and time on which to pursue
and achieve her needs.
This spatial and
temporal transformation, discussed already in Chapters 5 and 6, changes what it is to maintain a self.
Being ‘someone’ shifts from being associated with a certain quality the self
and others can abstract from the stream of everyday habitual action, to being a
continuously managed ‘project’, that is, an ‘external’ responsibility of the
self towards the social world. The self is now ‘in’ social space–time in a different way. Data,
discussed in Chapter 7, are a
crucial dimension of how this repositioning of the ‘self’ in space and time
changes power-relations, and changes the sorts of trace that digital selves can
have; it changes also the nature of the self’s reflexivity. The site of the self is being transformed, and this may be
the most important shift in how communications shape social reality in the past
decade.2
This deep
transformation is the reason, over and above the many layers of neoliberal
incitement and economic force, why it does not seem entirely
strange today, in a country such as the USA, to talk about the ‘branded’ self
(). Consider, for example, this advice about how to ‘manage your online brand’ from the
university careers guide quoted earlier:
Personal branding is about identifying and communicating what makes you unique, relevant and differentiated. Your online brand (digital footprint) is established through: photos, blogs, articles, comments, recommendations, reviews, likes, favourites, retweets, etc. Managing your online brand [. . .] can enhance both your personal and professional brand.
Even more
bluntly: ‘If you don’t have an active LinkedIn profile, you may as well be dead
(to the world of work).’3
Reducing this discourse to an ideology of neoliberal performance misses much of
what is important here. First, it talks about the online brand, and that is inseparable from the abstraction of
your ‘digital traces’: that is, the totality of ‘digital footprint’ that you
have left online. Second, what the individual has to modulate is not her
uniqueness – that much can be assumed – but rather her unique value to an exterior world, her ‘relevance’ and
‘differentiatedness’ (from others in a particular space of valuation). Third,
alongside the obvious and perhaps unobjectionable idea of a professional brand,
is the accompanying need for a ‘personal’ brand, because that will be judged
too. Fourth, it is never enough just to identify a difference; it must be communicated, and its digital traces lodged in a
relevant space of evaluation (such as LinkedIn).
Therefore, in an
age of deep mediatization, the self is constructed through new figurations that
are highly mediated. What would once have been called unproblematically the
‘socialization’ (here of early adulthood) becomes, under these conditions, as
much a matter of system-calibration as of contextual learning. The self’s
recorded performance becomes its own data: data to be protected, edited and
managed. As the quoted careers guide puts it, ‘use “Vanity search” (Google
yourself) to aggregate social mentions and delete unflattering content’. Online
tools are now marketed to optimize this process, with vivid names such as
Socioclean. We are back to the topic that Marcel Mauss announced eighty years
ago – the social construction of the self:
It is plain [. . .] that there has never existed a human being who has not been aware, not only of his body, but also at the same time of his individuality, both spiritual and physical [. . .] My subject is entirely different and independent of this. It is one relating to social history [. . .] how it slowly evolved – not the sense of ‘self ’ – but the notion or concept that men have formed of it. ()
Modern
institutions have, for some time, put very distinctive pressure on the self as
a site where various conflicts of value and worth must be resolved (). We are now
living through a deepening of those conflicts under new infrastructural
conditions, that is, deep mediatization.
Analysing the
changing figurations, and figurations of figurations, in which social actors
are routinely now involved provides a way into understanding these conflicts.
Digital media platforms now install self-projection and self-promotion as part of the basic means of the self to be
deployed across the managed continuity of online space and time. These means
are worked out through a series of performances and anticipations within
particular figurations. The resulting reconfiguration of
what selves do online has changed how individuals are in the world
and, in the course of this, recalibrated individuals’ potential relations to
social institutions.
It is worth
emphasizing two points about our analysis in this chapter. First, we are not
presuming a pre-existing independent self of the sort assumed in conventional
‘liberal individualism’. Rather, we mean by ‘the self’ only the viewpoint on
the social world associated with a particular embodied consciousness. But this
viewpoint and speaking position only emerges in the course of an individual’s
intermeshing with many other individuals and with a social world of
institutions and individuals: this is the basic insight of Elias’ notion of
‘figurations’ (). This notion of self is inherently
dialogical: ‘the self is brought into being by the communicational processes
established with others and with oneself’, a process of continually
‘negotiating meaning with others’ (). Because
this process of intermeshing is never complete and involves endless new
frictions and opportunities, it is impossible to see the self as static. As
Elias () puts it, ‘a person is constantly in movement; he not only
goes through a process, he is a process’. It is
essential therefore to dereify4 the notions of individual and society, and
understand their evolving networked relations.
The second point
applies the first: not only is the self always processual, but a special
attention must be paid to the material processes of forming and sustaining the
self. The figurations and underlying infrastructures whereby individuals come
to be in relations with others are themselves changing with deep mediatization.
There is a special value at such times in what Durkheim called ‘social
morphology’: a type of analysis that ‘observes [the social substratum] as it is
evolving in order to show how it is being formed’ (). The self is a good site to see at work this changing social morphology,
driven in part by large corporate interests in their search for new
sources of economic value. We will develop this, by considering, in turn,
socialization, the changing resources of the self, and the self’s digital
traces.
When Elias
introduces his account of social life as ‘networked phenomena’, his first
example is the process of ‘socialization’ (). We use this
term with some caution, since it can suggest a functionalist account in which
society’s values are unproblematically passed on to its youngest members, who
in turn reproduce them. No functionalist model is assumed here: by
‘socialization’, we mean merely the heterogeneous attempts and claims to pass
on certain legitimate norms within social life (whether successful or not).
When Elias wrote, it would have been absurd to argue for any role of media
institutions in this building-up of basic relationships; even if (unknown to
the child) some commercial branding and media processes had lain behind some of
the toys with which the child played (), there was no
question then of media entering into how children sustain relationships with
significant others. But, by the 1960s and 1970s, when as authors we spent our
early childhoods, the continuous presence of television and radio in most
family homes in Europe meant that media played a significant role in the imagined world of the child, as an important influx
from outside the home: television programmes produced for children, cartoons
and films, live sports broadcasts. Insofar as those sources sometimes generated
reference-points for play and performance (cartoon characters, sporting
heroes), there is no doubt that the role of media deserved already some
emphasis (), an emphasis completely absent in Berger and Luckmann’s
account of ‘socialization’, either in its primary (parental and family) or
secondary (institutional, especially educational) phases ().5
In this world, as children were growing up, media did nothing to mediate the
relations of primary or secondary socialization. Indeed at that time the
situations in which parents, teachers and school peers passed on norms and
values were still very likely to be face to face.
Today the
situation is very different for many children, at least in richer countries.
Their parents (and peers) are able to main a consistent ‘presence’ to them
through mobile phones and other devices. Everyday play for the child may
involve what we might call the ‘depth of field’ of complex media interfaces
such as the tablet. Books (a form of media too, of course) have played this
role at least from the nineteenth century, but only recently have children
possessed media that offer manipulable interfaces
with the world (). One of us was recently standing on
the 100th floor of Shanghai’s tallest skyscraper, the Financial District Tower,
and, along with everyone else, marvelling at the view: at our feet was a young child (around two years
old) who had her back turned to the view and was playing, completely absorbed,
with a tablet. Meanwhile, tablets have become commonplace in schools, for
reasons as much to do with the corporatization of the school as an environment
() as with the new capacities of contemporary media
generations (). The ‘class’, as Sonia Livingstone and Julian
Sefton-Green () call it, is nowadays a deeply mediatized space, in which
‘personal autonomy and control’ () in relation to media have great
value: a key question there becomes whether teachers can have access to
students’ social platforms’ profiles (and vice versa).
Two important
steps are involved here. First, the child increasingly depends from her early
awareness on a media infrastructure, in order to be present to and with her
parents. Such basic forms of initial socialization once did not involve media,
but now increasingly they do. Since,as Berger and Luckmann rightly say, the
child generally knows their parents not just as one set of parents among
others, but ‘as the world, the only existence and
only conceivable world’ (), mediated connection is now installed
from early on as an operating condition of ‘the world’ itself. Second, media
infrastructure is intrinsic to the space of play: it is a mediated space–time
(of games, database searching, talking, seeing photos, playing with images) into which the child reaches when she reaches out to
play, whether with or without her parents. This transformation has spread far
beyond elites, at least in rich countries.6
Fleer () provides an example of the use of video-editing via tablet in play
among the under-fives in Australia, while Sun Systems’ John Gage expresses
nicely the general transformation under way, albeit not from an objective
standpoint:
Today a child, anywhere in the world, linked to the Internet, can reach across the network to access databases of images, bring them to the screen and fly across the face of the earth, zooming down the streets and homes or up over mountain peaks and down river valleys. Today, a child can see planes on runways at San Francisco International Airport, visit the hospital inside the Imperial Palace in Tokyo, float above cars and trucks on the streets of Kabul, circle Mount Everest, or examine the bottom of the Grand Canyon. ()
In that sense,
mediated connectivity becomes an operating condition of the child’s imagined
world, as well as, later on, its secondary institutions of socialization.
Talk about media
and doing things with media becomes a basic part of socialization. The media
environment, and the computer-based infrastructure of information on which that
environment is based, is today part of the interactional world about which the child
starts to reflect, as she gets older. A facility for interacting fluently with
that world becomes part of how a child grows into that world well. This happens in different ways in different
cultures and under different conditions of wealth and poverty (),
but that this mediated dependency is a potential feature of
socialization everywhere is undeniable. The conditions of socialization have in
other words changed. Socialization, in its basic aspects, has
become mediatized.
A sign of this is
that parents’ working definitions of literacy may be changing from traditional
book literacy to include a facility for using digital technologies in everyday
life, resulting in a growing disconnect between the home environment and school
environment – assuming schools restrict access to tablets for the under-fives,
but parents encourage them.7
There is much more to be discovered, for sure, about media’s potential to enhance skills through play. Some argue for a new
pedagogic framework of ‘participatory learning’ and ‘media literacies’ () which explicitly recognizes the role of cross-media
interfaces: first, in deepening the ways in which children can construct worlds
in play and then communicate about those worlds; second, in facilitating
children’s memory-structure within play via the archiving and editing features
of digital devices; and third, through enhancing children’s awareness of the
multiple ways of expressing the same idea in different media (). Particularly interesting is the notion of ‘distributed cognition’,
that is, ‘forms of reasoning that would not be possible without the presence of
artefacts or information appliances’ (). The potential
that digital devices have to augment human cognitive capacities, and so the
cognitive dimension of socialization, is important (). Media contents’ transferability in
multi-media contexts has become intrinsic to practical ways of learning and
thinking (). At the same time, the world of early learning may no
longer involve any barrier between contexts of literacy and contexts of
commercial consumption, a point made forcefully by cultural sociologist Dan
Cook:
the world of consumption and marketplaces represents a key and absolutely necessary site for the study of childhood – as well as for social action – precisely because it disrupts even the most generous of conceptions of children and the locus of power. To keep consumption, popular culture and media culture separate and distant from children and childhood in our studies and undertakings is to reaffirm a vision of social life disconnected from lived experience. ()
If so, the encouragement towards a new
type of mediated literacy is ambiguous, to say the least. There is much more to
be said here, for example, on children’s early skills of searching online,
taking pictures for exchange, sharing things online, chatting online, and
commenting on each others’ digital skills. The main point for the generations
growing up with deep mediatization is that they become socialized into a world in which the media manifold is a matter of
course. While that doesn’t imply a new generation has homogeneous patterns of
media and communications practice – a misunderstanding we find in discussion
about ‘digital natives’ () – the range of young
people’s media and communications practices will have in common a basis
reaction to a transformed media environment which for them is ‘natural’ and
provides the basis for their positioning in the social world.
Equally important
however are children’s expectations from an early age that they will leave
digital traces. We both grew up in an age when, while the camera was not rare,
it was relatively cumbersome (to use and to have its images developed) and the
taking of photographs or videos was an occasional event, performed always with
considerable emphasis: on holiday, at major family events, and so on. This is
very different from today’s world, in rich countries at least, of continuous
image-swapping and posting. What family occasion is not
now accompanied by someone taking a picture, usually on their mobile phone, and
later exchanging it so that absent others can see it and comment on it? A
well-known expression of this is the ‘selfie’. It is today banal for the child to have her actions associated with
the possibility of later commentary: ‘that looked nice!’, ‘you looked so pretty
that day!’, ‘did you have a good time (I saw the pics on Facebook)?’ This is
the result not of the technologies themselves – a technologically determinist
approach would precisely miss the work of social construction going on here –
but of our practices with and around digital technologies which builds a tissue of media resource and media-based reflection
around much of everyday growing up. As children, we grew up leaving few trails
of connection as we moved from day to day, situation to situation. That is not
true for the contemporary child: the texture of everyday
life during childhood has changed, and that texture is woven, primarily, out of mediated materials, out of the basic
platforms for externalization and exchange that media devices and
infrastructures provide ().
We can talk
validly then of the mediatization of socialization. This plays out in multiple
ways for early adulthood: teenagers who are still in education, and young
adults – whether or not teenagers, since the average age of entering work varies radically from
country to country – who have recently entered the world of work and are
starting to form key emotional partnerships outside the family. Early adulthood
is in between what Berger and Luckmann () called ‘primary
socialization’ by which the child becomes a member of society (through
relations with parents and increasingly peers), and ‘secondary socialization’,
in which the socialized individual is introduced to new domains of the social
world (centres of further education, clubs and workplaces).
Young adults’
primary socialization with peers exhibits even more dramatic evidence of
mediatization than early childhood. We have already discussed the role of media
in mediating children’s interface with parents: this continues through teendom,
with the mobile phone texting and calling, and online chat streams accessible
via smartphones, playing a key role in linking parents and teenagers together as
they move across space (). In addition, mediated spaces
and platforms have become for countless adolescents the
space where they ‘hang out’ away from parents and other sources of authority.
As danah boyd () noted in an important essay on young people growing up in
the USA, free speech and relatively unregulated behaviour are impossible for
them in their homes or in public spaces or shopping malls, schools and the
like, so social media provide a crucial space in which to be in the world. In that sense, social networking sites
are not a lifestyle or fashion choice, but a response to necessity whose configuration depends precisely on the
spatial features of the internet:
What is unique about the internet is that it allows teens to participate in unregulated publics while located in adult-regulated physical spaces such as homes and schools [. . .] they do so [not to turn their backs on adults but] because they seek access to adult society. Their participation is deeply rooted in their desire to engage publicly. ()
This space to be is of particular importance for those whose
identities are marginalized or stigmatized in adult society, for example sexual
minorities (). From this basic point, however, certain consequences
flow for how primary socialization with peers now works. The basic structure of
platforms and their commercial imperatives create certain distinctive
conditions that affect how teenagers and young adults can exist in public.
Unlike face-to-face meetings, such public existence is ‘searchable’, leaving a
permanent trail of digital traces, which is also easily replicable, and so may
start chains of signification across multiple contexts and
actions beyond the control
of the initial actor. These longer-term consequences play out, in part, in
front of audiences who the initial actor doesn’t, and cannot, know: what danah
boyd calls ‘invisible audiences’. As she points out: ‘in unmediated spaces,
structural boundaries are assessed [by young people] to determine who is in the
audience and who is not [. . .] In mediated spaces, there are no [spatial]
structures to limit the audience; search collapses all virtual walls’ (). That does not mean young people cannot find ways, over time, to
deal with these consequences, and boyd’s later work () charts ways in which
at least US teenagers may do exactly that. But it does mean that, as they grow
up, young people face uncertainty about ‘where’ and ‘when’ they act, and so
whether they, or someone or something else, is ultimately in control, as they
perform ordinary actions.
Online
performance is however only one aspect of how, in the course of growing up,
young adults are now being required to reflect on and make choices about how
they want to be mediated. Sherry Turkle’s book Alone Together
() comments on how young people of school age, again in the USA,
are increasingly rationing the real-time media-based communications they have
with others, because of the pressures and risks attached to open-ended
communication (for example, on the phone or on online chat): for example, a
16-year-old school pupil who told Turkle that she preferred SMS text to phone
calls ‘because in a call “there is a lot less boundness to the person”’ (). Digital media put young people in view of, and in contact with,
such a large potential group of peers and others that it is not surprising they
are developing ways of screening people out. But as Turkle notes, this may lead
to an instrumentalization of personal communication that is unhealthy.
Philosopher Immanuel Kant’s injunction that one should always treat people as
‘ends not means’ () is not, without considerable adjustment,
even compatible with a time when, in the ordinary course of
early life, one acquires hundreds of Facebook friends and thousands of Twitter
followers. The question Turkle poses is whether the continuous availability of
today’s mediated relationships enhances togetherness and community-building, or
rather creates a sheath of superficial connection: continuous involvement with
no depth. When it comes to socialization, Turkle understands face-to-face
conversation as important but under pressure from the new forms of what she
calls ‘(quantified) self-reports’ via social platforms and the resulting sense
of oneself as an ‘algorithmic self’ (). Data processes
here enter the fabric of the self’s reflexivity.
A further version
of these pressures may occur when an individual starts paid work, and
encounters for the first time new institutions of secondary socialization in the form of employers,
but under conditions where the individual is particularly liable to be shaped,
indeed trained, in a certain way. Dave Eggers’ novel The
Circle () offers a brilliant fable on these issues. It follows
the trajectory of a keen new employee, Mae Holland, at a technology company
whose goal is to build a complete interface for all interactions, transactions
and data accumulation online. The important point of the commercial imperatives
behind such business models is that they depend on the individual’s commitment
to input data constantly from ‘natural’ social
intercourse, so that it can be aggregated and processed, contributing to wider
value-generation: as Eggers imagines, towards the ever more complete
achievement of the ‘circle’ of knowledge. In the course of submitting to this
imperative, Mae Holland finds that she risks dismantling the boundaries –
around her informal self, and those of her friends and parents too – on which
her everyday functioning as a social self had implicitly relied. The walls, not
just of particular situations but also of her social self, collapse, and for a
while she cannot go on. An older character reacts to the pressures of constant
connectivity even more drastically by committing suicide ‘live’ (that is, in view
of social networks). What Eggers dramatizes is a situation, increasingly
recognizable in many societies, where the pressure to be part of a ‘pervasive
sociality’ – curated not out of love or affection, but for profit – conflicts
with the self’s need for freedom, for a ‘scope for movement’ and ‘breathing
room’ ().
These issues
affect not just young adults, but all adults. They impinge however with
particular intensity on those in the early stages of adulthood who are building their work- and friend-networks outside the
family for later life (). Presence on social media platforms
necessitates submission to external judgement by peers as well as by non-peers
(such as potential employers). As one participant in a focus-group study of
Norwegian students put it, ‘on Facebook, you judge each other’s lives. That’s
what you do’ ().8
This is the significance of the many contemporary stories of young adults
suddenly finding that the regulatory pressures of the adult work-world
intervene in their socializing activities with peers. When employers can search
back into the present and past social media archive of
their potential employees, to look for misdemeanours and indiscretions, or
signs of undesirable opinions,but without of course any access to the context
that gave those earlier traces their meaning, a fundamental rupture has emerged
in the fabric of socialization. Processes of healthy experimentation with
social roles, or with social boundaries – simply through the way the internet’s
architecture works: its ability to archive everything without undifferentiation
– get converted into‘evidence’
(at some arbitrary point in the future) of something problematic. This damages
the very movement of socialization which allows early periods of
reduced accountability when young adults prepare for the fully accountable
domain of adulthood. Deep assumptions about the contextual integrity
on which the functioning of everyday life depends () are
here overridden by archival fiat. The young adult self increasingly finds
itself in a new, hyperlinked situation of
uncertain spatial and temporal span: the expanded ‘situation’ is part of what
young selves must increasingly reflect upon.
This contemporary
transformation of the modalities of socialization in
childhood and early adulthood finds a striking, if distant, parallel in Norbert
Elias’ 1930s reflections on the conditions for the emergence of the modern
state:
the whole apparatus which shapes the individual, the mode of operation of the social demands and prohibitions which mould his social makeup, and above all the kinds of fear that play a part in his life are decisively changed. ()
Fear is a key
force in socialization; it moulds our sense of the spaces and contexts in which
we are safe, and of the relations to time, which are comfortable, or not
comfortable, to us. Fear generates the need for new rules, new primers of
behaviour. In the early European Renaissance, leading philosophers such as
Erasmus advised young people on how to manage their body.9 Today, young adults –
and increasingly even children too – are required to manage not just their
physical bodies, but also their ‘data bodies’. A modern Erasmus would surely
need to include a chapter on how to comport oneself on social media platforms.
For, as one employer in the previously quoted careers guide comments about a
potential employee’s social media trail: ‘it’s the first thing I look at’. A
phenomenology of the social world must register this changing social
morphology.
So far we have
argued that media and communications are transforming how selves are ‘in’ the
social world, and the processes through which they come to be social actors
(socialization). But this transformation cannot be separated from changes in
the nature of the self.
The self,
understood not as a substance, but as a process, is hugely complex. An
important strand in social psychology has emphasized that the self is not
formed in opposition to the external ‘social’ world, or to particular ‘others’ within it, but in continuous
dialogue with that world and its others (). Recognizing the
complex processual nature of the self – always changing and developing, always
reflecting on and transforming itself, never complete – is quite consistent
with recognizing that the self uses many means, including media, for
interfacing with the world. But it is important not to assume that the
expansion of media platforms through which the self now faces the social world
do not in themselves imply any change to the self
in its fundamental nature. Framing things that way – through,
for example, a claim that our self is simply now ‘extended’ or ‘distributed’ by
its technological practices () – misses
precisely the tensions that flow from the attempt to maintain the self’s
freedom and integrity as a project () under these new and highly
challenging conditions. It is not the self that is extended but, rather, the
space–time across which the self is now exposed, managed and
governed.
A positive aspect
of this transformation is that the self now has new resources available to it
for sustaining its integrity as a reflexive project for action (). Let us now examine some of the new resources available to the self
through media and especially digital informationinfrastructures: we will turn
in the next section to the particular issues that arise for resources derived
from data infrastructures.
The self relies
at all times on resources acquired in the processes of socialization and daily
life. By ‘resource’, we mean material structures (whether institutions, spaces,
tools, facilities, capital),10
which enhance the ability of the self to act in various ways: from the analysis
of this chapter so far, it is clear that media are today part of the resources
of the self. We can think about those resources as forming three distinct
types: first, resources for self-narration (identity maintenance
through narrative); second, resources for self-representation
(or presenting); and third, resources for self-maintenance,
that is, for keeping the self as a functioning social actor. In conducting its
battles, the self always carries an account of itself born out of a desire to
narrate the particularity of its path through the world (). Only
in certain societies and cultural contexts however have individuals had the
practical means, resources and status to circulate an account of the
particularities of their life. The ability to create and continuously revise a
narrative (text, images, sound, archive) that came with digital media is a
significant chapter in the history of the self that supplements the earlier
history of the diary, and so on. First, the blog and more recently the timeline
on social media platforms have become banal, expected whenever someone works
abroad for a year, goes on a special journey, experiences a life-changing challenge (e.g. cancer).
But this increasing frequency should not mask what is far from banal about
these developments: the extended spatiotemporal reach of self-narratives, which
is distinctive to the age of digitalization. ‘My blog’, to quote one respondent
to Korean researchers Jinyoung Min and Hweseok Lee, ‘is where my thoughts meet
the world’ ().
Depending on the
structure of one’s society, and in particular its hierarchies of voice, this
interface between self and world can be transformative, as for example with the
Middle Eastern (especially Saudi) women bloggers analysed by Guta and Karolak
(). If speaking up in a public space is deeply restricted (as for women in
many Middle Eastern countries), the blog is a liminal site where otherwise
silent selves enter public existence, even if still a restricted one ().
Once we move
beyond the basic innovation of opening one’s thoughts to the
social world, an interesting underlying structure emerges. Consistently
maintaining a blog or an active platform page involves maintaining a ‘presence’
() under conditions that are, inherently, much less
controllable than in the face-to-face performances analysed by Erving Goffman.
Through its desire to exhibit itself (), the blogging
self sustains its narrative presence, but becomes reliant on a third-party
curator or platform (one’s blog post, after all, can always be taken down, or
the platform discontinued). Unlike with face-to-face performance, the online
exhibition is always filtered by the platform used and the platform’s
algorithmic practice (); equally, through the open-ended architecture
of the web, it is available through search engines, to become read in new,
unpredictable contexts.
Self-narratives
have always been focused around a sense of some possible
audience, even if, as with the paradigmatic case of Anne Franks’ diary, it was
a reader in some unknowable future. That follows from the inherently social
nature of narrative as an anticipated exchange (). But, with offline narratives, it was possible to lock the diary in a
drawer or other secret place, or to restrict its readership to one or two
trusted friends. Such degree of control is however incompatible with the means by
which we externalize self-narrative today. As Andreas Kitzmann puts it:
Before electronic media, the place of the diary was a private place [. . .] for the Web diary writer [. . .] the audience is not only anticipated, but expected, and this influences the very manner in which the writer articulates, composes and distributes the self-document. ().
For that reason,
self-disclosure in the digital age is always in part ‘non-directed’ (). Depending on
the exact balance between expected and unexpected components within the
audience, the expectations, even norms, of distant audiences can start to shape
not just the writing, but even the life-process on
which the writing was meant to report,as one travel-blog writer suspects
(). This is all the more likely when the practice of blogging
becomes overlaid with the motivation of data measurement: a desire for ‘likes’
and other validating interactions with an unseen audience (). People can no doubt live with a
considerable degree of complexity here, inhabiting the ‘privately public’ or
the ‘publicly private’ (), and a processual understanding of the
self must acknowledge this. But if self-maintenance today necessarily involves
the risk of reaching an undesirable audience
(), then the processes of self-maintenance have been
unsettled in an important way.11
Another practice,
which has appeared to challenge our sense of the boundaries around the self, is
the selfie. It is too easy to dismiss this as simple narcissism, curious though
the sight is of someone walking through a remarkable location, selfie-stick in
hand, and taking regular pictures of themselves, hardly focusing on the look of
the location. But what is a selfie? Multiple interpretations have been offered:
as an attempt to visualize an insecure self into existence (); as
a practice of place-making (); as a gesture ();
or as an embryonic bid for attention and capital (). But two
Korean researchers Yoo Jin Kwon and Kyoung-Nan Kwon have perhaps best captured
the basic meaning: the selfie is a practical means for sustaining a continuous narrative of the self that can be taken as
‘natural’ (). Once we grasp this banal
purpose, we can acknowledge its often deeply paradoxical nature, captured in
this example from Israel: ‘D, a 16-year-old boy from Tel Aviv [who] is
intensely involved in photography. He takes many photos on a regular basis in
sundry situations: at school, with friends, with girls, or alone. However he is
not particularly interested in photography as such. In an interview, he
describes his range of subjects as extremely narrow: “only myself ”’ ().
The selfie stamps
the marker of ‘the self’ onto whatever things a person wants to record as a way
of increasing its value. But why should that have become so important recently? There are
no doubt many overlapping factors at work here including the changing
affordances of smartphones, but one background factor, we want to suggest, is
the increasing devaluation of introspection: that
is, reflecting, comparing, building the basis of a memory through organized
thought that remains ‘internal’ (still unshared). Introspection, in the habit
of taking selfies, gets overridden by the ‘higher’ value of generating an exchangeable
trace of one’s ‘experience’ whose form is tailored exactly to the data-based
needs of social media platforms.
The selfie is, in
other words, a repeated gesture of externalization,
whose insistence is striking, though not without precedent. In the late
eighteenth century it was fashionable for a while to carry a convex mirror (the
‘Claude glass’) as one walked in the countryside which would enable one to
compress a beautiful vista into a small focused image whose likeness to a
painting that one might have seen would thereby become clearer: the
‘picturesque’ needed a technique to produce itself reliably (). So too today, the selfie-stick with camera attached produces a reliable
self-tagged image of one’s passage through the world –
not for immediate consumption but for deferred value that will come from its
circulation via social media. The selfie integrates the deferred possibility of
online circulation perfectly into the present, so confirming Sage Elwell’s
point that ‘we no longer “go online”, rather the Internet is of a piece with
the infosphere where we already are and of which we are increasingly a part’
().
To say this is
not to deny the possibility of more intense and less banal forms of
self-externalization through media technologies. Media are, without question,
enabling new forms of intimacy towards loved ones: sending images of or
comments upon things just seen (); or continuous phatic
communication as in the ‘telecocoon’ of young lovers (). And
clearly such intensified externalization – so different in intensity and
regularity from the sparse generation of self-images in everyday life just
twenty years ago – brings risks, since one cannot be in full control of the
storage or distribution of this volume of symbolic material ().
Here the
deepening of mediatization becomes clear. For those who live in a world of
constant ‘connectivity’, the self faces new pressures to perform itself online
in order just to function as a social being. These pressures go
farbeyond the expression of identity, an optional supplement to everyday
existence, which – as Bev Skeggs () argued – attracts individuals very
differently, depending on class and gender. The transformation of resource we are discussing here is
more basic: a requirement just to be present on particular platforms and in
particular exchanges, and the preconditions for being cognitively equipped for
the world. The needs of basic social recognition and basic practical functioning
converge on the production of one’s ‘data double’. The self becomes
increasingly dependent on digital infrastructure for its survival
and integrity.12
The operating conditions of digital infrastructures become part of the
functioning conditions of the self.
We have noted one
consequence already in the problem of too much social
memory: the need, that is, to forget, in order to have the possibility of
forgiving actions in a distant past ().
But this is only one (temporal) dimension of the wider transformation of the
self’s place within the social: can there then be excessive connectivity? Ben
Agger approaches this through the notion of what he calls ‘iTime’: ‘it is
non-trivial that people are always available as they exist in iTime [. . .].
One cannot hide in iTime. Boss, colleagues, family expect one to be available’
(). Across all these contexts, a consistency of performance
seems required (), yet perhaps is unattainable. Before we just
succumb to the requirement of consistency, it is worth remembering that in the
ancient classical world, the problem was rather different. Remember the saying
of Roman philosopher Seneca: ‘Believe me, it is a major achievement to act as
one person’ (). Two millennia later, in an age
where family, friendship and work are performed in a continuous set of linked
spaces,13 we ask a different
question: how much inconsistency is a self now
allowed?
In the next
section, we turn to one particular version of these tensions and potentials:
the self’s increasing ability, perhaps necessity, to generate meaning from its
‘digital traces’, and the infrastructural dependencies that follow from this.
A prominent
characteristic of the self in the age of deep mediatization is the digital traces s/he leaves: whatever we do, we leave
‘footprints’ of our digital media use that build digital traces. We do this
consciously for example by uploading photographs or writing comments on the
‘timelines’ of digital platforms. More often we do this unaware, as an unintended
side-effect of our activities in a media-based domain, for example using our
smartphones’ or cars’ navigation systems (and leaving a ‘trace’ of where we
are); doing our shopping and leaving ‘traces’ of our transaction when we pay by credit card, smartphone
or discount card. But digital traces even go further: they are made not just by
us but also by others when they interact online
with reference to us, for example when they synchronize their address books
with our digital addresses, tag pictures, texts or other digital artefacts with
our name, and so on. It can even be argued that digital traces now begin before
birth with the ‘mediatization of parenthood’ (): pregnancy is
accompanied by an ongoing flow of communication via apps and platforms that
produce digital traces of the child growing in the womb. Some argue that
nowadays ‘we cannot not leave digital traces’ ().
But how can we
understand digital traces in detail? Digital traces are more than just (big)
data: they are a form of digital data which becomes meaningful only when a
sequence of ‘digital footprints’ is related to a certain actor or action,
typically (of ) a person but in principle also a collectivity or organization.
It is the tie of data to the unique individual that underlies why
marketers and other institutions of data processing are highly interested in
collecting and aggregating data. Such data is not just any information, but
always information linked to processes of counting, as reflected in the French
expression for digital traces, traces numériques.
Digital traces are numerically produced correlations of disparate kinds of data
that are generated by our practices in a digitalized media environment. Because
of the tie that such correlations always have to a certain entity or process in
the social world, digital traces are a major, but not the only, reference-point
for how a social entity acquires its ‘digital identity’.
This deep
mediatization of the self has, unsurprisingly, generated much debate about how
sociology can, any more, stay in touch with what selves are and do.14 Some academics go
one step further and argue that the self’s digital traces amount to more than
traces of a self that still (in principle) can be reached through other routes
(observation, listening). They argue that such traces offer for the first time
a direct access to ongoing processes of social
construction. Maybe the most prominent example is Bruno Latour’s integration of
the investigation of digital traces into his overall approach to social
analysis (). A ‘digital traceability’ () then becomes a possibility for analysing processes of social construction
in situ: ‘being interested in the construction of
social phenomena implies tracking each of the actors involved and each of the
interactions between them’ (). This approach attempts to move beyond the old
micro/macro divide (a classic topic in sociology)15
by arguing that statistical methods allow us to get at ‘macro’ phenomena directly by an analysis of the individuals’ online
activities. With digital traces, they claim, we have a direct access that
allows us to witness processes of assembling in the moment they take place
().
This argument is,
in our view, fundamentally mistaken: it misunderstands the nature of digital
traces in relation to the self. The error begins with misinterpreting the
social world as ‘flat’ and so accessible to analysis simply through an
aggregation of trace-patterns registered in the various data domains that are underpinned
by media infrastructure. Such patterns may well have some value, but this move
reduces the complexity of the contemporary social world to a flat plane without
differentiated levels, so replicating on a large scale the problem with the
concept of assemblages that we have critiqued already in Chapter 4. Second, and even more
fundamentally, such an approach misunderstands digital traces as something
‘neutral’, offering us a ‘direct access’ to the social world. However, they are
not ‘neutral phenomena’ but rely on the technical procedures of governing institutions that produce this kind of
information. The construction of the self’s traces therefore already, through
its very process, inscribes certain interests as well as
visions of society: we find here a strange echo of
Jacques Derrida’s () insistence on how subjectivity (‘the self of
the living present’) is always ‘a trace’ that links to a ‘temporalization’ and
‘spacing’ that carries beyond itself. Digital traces do not offer access to the
social world ‘as it is’ but an access to the procedures whereby powerful
organizations attempt to construct a world on which they
can act.
A materialist
phenomenology must therefore take a rather different approach to the self’s
digital traces. Far from treating them as direct ‘traces’ of what is, it
insists on approaching them from two directions: first, in terms of their consequences for the everyday world of the individual
and, second, in terms of their origins in the
world-making strategies of governing institutions. Because all social
classifications are ‘interactive’ (), these two aspects
overlap in the flow of practice, but at no point do they converge into the
possibility that the self’s data traces provide direct access to the social.
This complicates our evaluation of contemporary movements that attempt to
transform reflexivity through processes based precisely on datafication, to
which we turn next.
Quite how big an
adjustment data practices demand of sociology’s traditional approach to the
self emerges when we return to the original thoughts of Berger and Luckmann on
self-consciousness. As they put it:
The world of everyday life is not only taken for granted as reality by the ordinary members of society in the subjectively meaningful conduct of their lives. It is a world that originates in their thoughts and actions, and is maintained as real by these. [. . .] we must attempt to clarify the foundations of knowledge in everyday life [. . .] [in] the objectivation of subjective processes (and meanings) by which the intersubjective common-sense world is constructed. ()
To some extent at
least, this starting-point is uncontestable, but in certain key respects it is
now in tension with a new notion of self-consciousness and self-knowledge that
is emerging through the automated collection of data. Gary Wolf is a key
proselytizer of the ‘quantified self ’ movement: while aware of the tensions
and potential strangeness of the idea that ‘self-knowledge [comes] through
numbers’ (), he also provides some of the key arguments in apparent
support of this proposition. For example, the idea that ‘our ordinary behaviour
contains obscure quantitative signals that can be used to inform our behaviour,
once we learn to read them’ (), which of course builds on the
practical starting-point discussed throughout this chapter that ‘social media
made it seem normal to share everything’ (ibid., added emphasis).
The process is self-fuelling: ‘the more [people] want to share, the more they
want to have something to share’ (). This is an explicitly
collaborative form of mediated construction that, as it grows in regularity and
intensity, produces alongside each concrete individual a ‘data double’
() which – from certain perspectives like those of
the quantified self movement, but also perhaps some contemporary governments
() – contains more ‘truth’ than an individual’s own
self-reflections. We are witnessing here innovations in relation to the
fundamental languages for describing and measuring the self: we cannot
therefore imagine them to be innocent of power. On the contrary, what is under
way is a transformation of social and
political power: as Julie Cohen () puts it, ‘we are witnessing the
emergence of a distinctly Western, democratic type of surveillance society, in
which surveillance is conceptualized first and foremost as a matter of
efficiency and convenience’.
The case of self-quantification in the
health domain is particularly illuminating. More and more people are using
tracking devices to generate continuous data about themselves (for example,
heart-rate, metabolic rate and so on). As Deborah Lupton points out, this is
more than just another ‘technology of the self’ (): it is a way
of embedding the self, and its ‘data practices’, in a much wider infrastructure
of data generation, aggregation and analysis, which potentially might transform
the distribution of resources in the health industries away from cure and
towards continuous activities of prevention. Aside from the installation of
self-measurement into the basic processes of everyday life (a ‘personal
Taylorism’ (), this changes what counts as
self-awareness, with so-called self-quantifiers using ‘data to construct the
stories that they tell themselves about themselves’ (), and the norms that orient reflexive self-awareness.16
So far these
practices are the preserve of a small movement of enthusiastic first-adopters,
but they have behind them a considerable momentum and leverage.17 Some in the health
industries see patients’ continuous sharing of their health data as part of an
(increasingly obligatory) practice of ‘self-management’ ().
Though sometimes disguised as a game, as a sort of play, self-monitoring
‘enrolls people into self-governance by using their highest aspirations and
capacities, that of selfcase and self-development’ ():
once we acknowledge the gaps in our normal memories, why not supplement them
with the ‘more objective’ materials generated automatically by continuous data
collection ()? Yet, the price of playing along is
acceptance of a data collection and data-sharing infrastructure whose rules are
non-negotiable (). There are of course problems like
tracking devices, which may generate too much information to be interpreted
(). But those concerns may easily be overridden by more
powerful claims: for example, that data collection tools enable subjects to become conscious of their otherwise unconscious
behaviours and behavioural patterns (); that this is how
individuals take responsibility for preventive medicine (); or more generally that this is how individuals optimize their ‘performance’ along various dimensions
().
Positive readings
of these developments are readily available: as a protective ‘technology
blanket’ wrapped around the self (); as an ‘improved “higher
quality” self’ (); as a form of collaborative memory (Frith
and Kalin, forthcoming) or ‘macroscope’ (); or even, according to one
leading proselytizer, Kevin Kelly, as a form of an ‘exoself’ (). There is no doubt of the serious commercial intent to
build such a comprehensive layer of data-tracking around the individual, at
least in the context of the richest societies and their highly resourced health
and personal development industries. To speak of such developments as a
transformation of the ‘self’, however, precisely begs the key question: whether
such quantification practices are compatible with other senses of the self and,
even if so, whether the price they exact is too high. Once we leave aside the
more crass rhetoric (for example of a ‘people-powered health’ at the Nesta web
page),18 the notion of every
person carrying an ‘algorithmic skin’ is closely tied to the futures of
‘commercial, governmental and medical research’ (), and
mobilizes a discourse about self-awareness for distinctively institutional
ends. As Williamson puts it:
Self-quantification produces a ‘calculable public’, a public that is presented back to itself through the data organized and coordinated by algorithmic approximations of its traceable health activities. ()
So strong is the
drive towards greater self-awareness and more sustainable self-improvement that
it is easy to lose track of the potential damage that is being done here to our
everyday notions of self-consciousness which have never, until now, needed to
resort to external data-gathering infrastructures to validate their claims
about self, others and the social world. There is a risk already, even before
we consider the biases that the process of metrification and datafication
introduce into daily life.
We have explored
in this chapter a self that, through the operations of the media manifold,
increasingly interacts in extended domains of the social world – which in turn
act back on the self, increasingly through processes of datafication. This self
is a site of tension between its own claims to awareness and new notions of
‘enhanced’ self-awareness derived from new automated data-gathering techniques.
These potential new transformations carry a price. While apparently enhancing
the freedom of the self, they build into the fabric of the self an
infrastructural dependency: a process of institutionalization
and materialization that, because of the asymmetrical
power-relations at work in the media domain involved, introduces a dimension of
unfreedom that today’s selves must confront ().
Deep
mediatization – that is, the integration of media-based processes and relations into the very elements
from which the self sustains its project as a self –
introduces therefore a new friction into daily life. We will consider this
problem more fully in Chapter 10.
Undeniably however, if the site of the self is transformed by mediatization,
then so too is the site of the ‘we’ that comes together through the grouping of
selves. The risk that we mimic each other in certain ways and so converge
artificially in our behaviours on online platforms, becoming ‘partial analogues
of others’, has been noted for a while (). We need in the next
chapter to explore more broadly how the construction of ‘collectivity’ operates
in an age of deep mediatization.
We discussed in
the last chapter what deep mediatization means for the self. We ask in this
chapter the same question for what we will call ‘collectivities’. That term is
just the latest in a line of concepts used historically to describe groupings
of various sorts: from ‘masses’ and ‘crowds’ to ‘citizen publics’ and
‘communities’.1
With digitalization, further types of collectivity-building and other,
‘smaller’ media-related collectivities gain importance. Even more recent is the
phenomenon of collectivities created by automated calculation based on the
‘digital traces’ that individuals leave online. While our descriptive concepts
change, one fundamental point remains: media are conceived as an essential
means for bringing complex collectivities into being, and as a consequence
changes in media transform the dynamics of collectivities. We therefore need a
more detailed analysis of the various forms of collectivities and the contexts
in which they are typically formed.
We define as a
collectivity any figuration of individuals that share a certain meaningful
belonging that provides a basis for action- and orientation-in-common.
The form of such meaningful belonging can differ. It can be a feeling of a
‘common we’, as with traditional face-to-face communities (). It
can be based on a ‘shared organized situational action’, as in the case of
smart mobs (). Or it can be based on processes of datafication
like the collectivities of ‘numeric inclusion’ (). And also
when we consider questions surrounding community,a change of perspective might
be helpful to grasp community not as a given entity but as an ongoing process
of community-making: that is, in Weber’s term, ‘communitization’ (Vergemeinschaftung).2
Across all these specific cases, the key characteristic of collectivities
remains their meaningful character for the actors involved – and
media play an important role in supporting the construction of such meaning.
This understanding of collectivity is much more specific than the concept of
‘collectives’ used in recent writing about assemblages (), which has recently been adopted in media
and communication research
(). Referring back to Tarde (), we find there an
emphasis on the ‘repetition’ that results in the emergence of ‘collectives’
(). Such collectives are assemblages of humans and
non-humans that have a certain form of joint agency.3 These reflections
allow us to think about the close media-relatedness of our collectivities
(), but it is unhelpful to confuse any linkage of
human actors and media whatsoever with a collectivity. That fails to demarcate
those groupings that are more than just an assemblage, because they involve the
construction of meaningful ‘boundaries’ through communication.4
How can we
understand the ways in which collectivities are transformed in an era of deep
mediatization? What are their characteristics and particular features? First,
we will explain the fundamental processes of collectivity-building within
groups, and then explore collectivities purely based on imagination and datafication.
While older forms
of ‘community’ entail stability, coherence and embeddedness, tied to shared
experience or common history, social relations based on ‘network sociality’
less ‘narrational’ than ‘informational’, involving primarily ‘an exchange of
data and on catching up’ (). For many writers, network
sociality is associated with the loss of community,
and is enabled by ‘communication technology, transport technology and technologies
to manage relationships’ ().5
Similarly analyses are offered of ‘networked individualism’ (), which involves translocal mediated
communications not constructed any more by reference to a single place.6
Accounts like
these are however problematic since they reduce these transformations to a
switch within a simplified binary (‘network’ versus ‘community’ (). They also reduce media-related changes to a single line of
transformation. But we can hardly locate any one single way in
which collectivities are being transformed: various forms of collectivities
diverge from each other while others have their boundaries blurred. It is also
inadequate to describe these collectivities simply as ‘networks’: rather, they
build complex figurations with a certain constellation of actors, and it is the
latter constellation that we can describe as a network.
However, collectivities remain phenomena constructed through processes of
meaning; they have a meaningful boundary even if they are locally situational, like smart mobs. On the
contrary, the variety of collectivities has expanded through the use of media
technologies.
It is useful
nonetheless to distinguish analytically between two basic kinds of collectivity
because media and their infrastructures play different roles in these
figurations. There are collectivities for which media are constitutive in the sense that those collectivities
cannot exist without media, for example online groups. These collectivities
constituted by media emerged with mediatization, and we therefore call them
‘media-based collectivities’.And then there are collectivities (for example,
families) for which media are not constitutive but are increasingly constructed through and moulded by media-related
communications: we call these ‘mediatized collectivities’.
Media can
constitute collectivities in two ways. First, they can offer by their content a frame of relevance for constructing
such collectivities. Second, they can offer the space of communication
in which these collectivities get constructed, regardless of the actual content
that meet their specific frames of relevance. In the first case, media are
constitutive in the sense of constructing the meaningful boundaries of these
collectivities. In the second case, media are constitutive in the sense of
supporting the communications practices through which these collectivities
always get constructed. Each type has its specific dynamics that requires a
more detailed analysis, but both need the label ‘media-based collectivity’.
The clearest
examples of media-based collectivities are those that gather around particular
media content (). An example for this, often discussed in media
and communications research, is ‘audiences’, especially for exceptional media
events (): people
who follow television sports games, ceremonies, extraordinary popular shows or
comparable ‘events’ that are communicated as a source of collective
identification. Later we will discuss in more detail to what extent processes
of constructing ‘imagined collectivities’ (of the nation or of other kinds) are
at work here. The point we want to make is that, even if these people do not
necessarily feel themselves to be part of a community, they may still build a
more loosely connected collectivity as the spectators of a particular media
spectacle ().
With reference to
certain forms of media content, we can also witness the emergence of more
stable collectivities for which ‘fan communities’ or ‘fan cultures’ are a prominent example
(). Media are important
here in a double sense: first, they define the relevance-frames for such
figurations; second, they are important as means for keeping these
collectivities together. With digital media the possible influence of these
collectivities increased as new ‘politics of participation’ became possible
‘not simply through the production and circulation of new ideas (the critical
reading of favourite texts) but also through access to new social structures
(collective intelligence) and new models of cultural production (participatory
culture)’ (). The digitalization of photography and the
rise of platforms for the easy sharing of images (those created digitally, and
digitized archival images) have enabled new collectivities to focus on sharing
memories in new ways (): as one participant in
Richard MacDonald’s study put it, ‘I’ve shown [my photos online] because it
might jog someone’s memory’ (). While we have
to be careful not to romanticize these collective cultures (), it is evident that
digitization has expanded their scale, scope and regularity. Importantly, some
media-based collectivities may now operate translocally, joining together
Taiwanese fans of, for example, Japanese and other foreign television
programmes, usually watched live through various unofficial online means (). But we have to be aware that using the word ‘community’ to describe them
is not necessarily helpful. Quite early on there was a discussion about how far
‘interpretive communities’ ()
necessarily constitute groups of people who know each other and have a
self-understanding as a group, or whether they might actually be much more
loosely attached collectivities. Such a discussion regains relevance as the
‘new digital environment increased the speed of fan communication, resulting in
[. . .] ‘just in time fandom’ (), partly experienced
through digital platforms and ‘second screens’ in parallel to other forms of
media use. The figurations of these fan collectivities become more diverse and
ever more deeply related to media technologies. Therefore, instead of
understanding each and every fan culture necessarily as a single community, we might do better to understand it
as a complex figuration of figurations that links up different local groups in
a range of interdependent activities.
Other media-based
collectivities include various sorts of ‘online groups’, and again it is an
open question how far they are communities. The owners of digital platforms
especially have a tendency to call themselves ‘communities’ and understand by
this rather a kind of forum function (). However, we should
be careful not to mix such ‘technological definitions of “community”’ () with sociological ones. Basically, online groups are figurations
that are built with reference to a certain platform and the topic of
communication there. But it is an empirical question whether
and how far these collectivities make progress towards
becoming a community (Weber’s question about ‘communitization’). Contemporary
digital platforms offer possibilities for creating a variety
of different online groups on one platform, each of them based on various
topics of interest, and various software add possibilities for online
group-building; for example, multi-user online games where game-related
collectivities like ‘guilds’ play against each other and whose construction is
supported by the game software in various ways (). The
‘guilds’ may be built, for example, by text- or video-chat in parallel to the
game played: such game-related collectivities may derive from or result in
offline relationships, or remain solely online (). The degree of community involved depends on the individual
case and its meaning.
Media-based
collectivities can also be local and situated; for example, ‘flash’ or ‘smart
mobs’. A ‘flash mob’ can be defined as a large group of people who gather by
the support of digital media in some predetermined location, perform some brief
action, and then quickly disperse (). The term ‘smart
mob’ () originally having a more specific political
focus, although the distinction has become blurred (). Whatever exact term we use, such mobs are forms of collectivity that have
(digital) media as a pre-condition of their existence, and are a figuration
tied to particular local gatherings or situations. In this they are similar to
other new forms of situational collectivities, like ‘mobile clubbing’ (groups
of people who go from bar to bar while connected by mobile media (), or ‘mobile gaming’ (), or ‘urban
swarms’ of protesters (). Whatever their duration, these
figurations, in their close relations to media, are typical of an era of deep
mediatization.
Even
collectivities whose existence and formation are independent of media
can form what we can call ‘mediatized collectivities’: families, peer groups,
migrant groups or groups of excluded people nowadays are collectivities whose
forms of meaningful belonging are, in part, constructed through
the use of media. Here we find what Nancy Baym calls ‘networked collectivism’: ‘groups of people now
network throughout the internet and related mobile media, and in-person
communication, creating a shared but distributed group identity’ ().
When it comes to
families, the appropriation of media – especially of television – was and still
is important for maintaining them as a collectivity (). However, the crucial point here is that keeping up
family life became a cross-media endeavour (). When family
photos are shared on online platforms and through that a family memory is
constituted (), or when
family relationships are articulated by digital media use (), it is the whole media ensemble that is involved. Such a
mediatization of the family enables new forms of the figuration of the family,
especially families that are spread across long distances and at the same time
keep up a close relation to their family members (): their ensemble of different media
(mobile phones, internet-based visual telephony, email, texting, digital
platforms) makes it possible to keep up family roles like that of ‘mothering’
across long distances. But media change the ‘feel’, ‘texture’ and ‘meaning’ of
a family’s relationships: the relationships between parents and children, for
example, if constructed by video conferences, telephone calls and mobile phone
surveillance, remain more distanced than one constructed mainly in face-to-face
interaction ().
Similarly with
peer groups. While nothing new, peer groups, especially of young people, are
nowadays moulded to a significant degree through their use of media, not least
because mediated popular culture provides them with a relevant point of
reference. Indeed, an increasing portion of young peer-groups’ communication as a group takes place via media: mobile phones,
digital platforms, chat apps (). Members of peer
groups feel under pressure to appropriate media and to fulfil the rules of communication
specific to them (). Group membership becomes defined by access to particular media ensembles so that
failure to use certain media may result in groupexclusion. Put differently, in
the age of deep mediatization, membership of a peer group is enacted through appropriating its media ensemble.
Further evidence
for the mediatization of collectivities comes from migrant groups. Nowadays the
very act of migrating is already highly intertwined with media: the ‘image’ of
the place to which one is migrating as well as the possible migration network
is built up via the internet before the act of
migration (). Migration itself is organized by digital platforms and smartphones,
which together allow detailed navigation, ongoing information, as well as
documentation of the migration process. The relevance these media have is
closely related to the ‘information precarity’ () of
refugees in large camps: without technological and social access to relevant
information, with irrelevant, sometimes dangerous, information prevalent,
unable to control the circulation of their own images, and under continuous
risk of surveillance by state authorities. The ‘connected migrant’ () is involved in various mediatized collectivities during his or
her journey, building mediatized groups of support along the way, and
maintaining at the same time contact with family, friends and others at the
place of origin.Media have always enabled migrants to maintain links to their
wider migrant group through various, mainly ‘smaller media’ (). But with digitalization these possibilities significantly increase ().
Deep
mediatization may also transform the experience of intensely marginalized
groups. One striking example is homeless people. For a long time, media have
been relevant as sources of entertainment and opportunities for communitization
in shelter homes and elsewhere (). With the spread of
digital media, homeless people in mediasaturated societies become regular users
of digital technology, especially of smartphones (). Beside organizational matters, they use these technologies to
maintain contact with friends and families and for collectivity building
(). Their media use goes beyond
self-representation as with homeless persons’ newspapers (). It is much more about keeping contact with and remaining part of ongoing
collectivities while still living on the street.7
It is obvious
that the specificities and possible transformations of the collectivities
discussed so far cannot be related solely to media. Other processes are driving
forces too: individualization (),
globalization (),
commercialization (). But having these further
meta-processes of change in mind and comparing ‘media-based’ and ‘mediatized
collectivities’, it becomes evident that collectivity-building does not
dissolve into a single form of individualized network. Collectivities remain a
meaningful unit of human life in times of deep mediatization, but through mediatization
become transformed in a range of ways. Three points are striking.
1. Media contents become
important resources for defining collectivities when media
contents become the ‘topic’ around which those collectivities are constructed.
This is especially evident in media-based collectivities such as fan cultures
that are predominantly defined by a shared enthusiasm for a certain media
content (a series, a genre, etc.). But it applies, too, to mediatized
collectivities – families, peer groups – that appropriate various kinds of
media in constructing their moralities, rules, boundaries and joint
experiences. While such content a decade ago was typically communicated by mass
media (print, film, radio, television), and access to it was more limited,
today a huge variety of symbolic resources is accessible via online
distribution. Therefore, the spectrum of possible
collectivities has increased fundamentally.
2. Media are means for
constructing collectivities, especially for online groups that constitutively
rely on their online space of communication, but also for those peer groups and
families that become related to the use of media like smartphones.
Actor-constellations may be sustained across long distances and collectivity
experienced synchronically at a distance, even under circumstances of intense
mobility, whether of individuals or the whole collectivity. New textures of
collectivity emerge through a variety of media ensembles as well as very different
opportunities for constructing collectivities. Together a collectivity’s
specific features and the communicative capacities of its media ensemble define
its possibilities of transformation.
3. Media trigger dynamics in
collectivities.
It is less the single medium that matters here than the whole media ensemble,8 the dynamics of which
can however vary hugely: having access to certain media may become fundamental
for becoming a member of this collectivity, or media may affect the
communication that takes place within collectivities (online groups, for
example, are well known for their practices of ‘flaming’, rooted in the lack of
co-presence between their members). Even in mediatized collectivities, the
degree to which members are ‘always on’ has consequences for the quality of
their communications.
Elaborating the
original ideas of Hubert Knoblauch (), we can call a shift from
‘collectivities of pure co-presence’ to
‘collectivities of multi-modal communication’. By this
we mean that, before the spread of today’s communications media, human
collectivities involved co-presence, in which everyone knew each other,
practices typically were shared, and core knowledges were distinctive of the
whole collectivity. This is the conception of community found in classic writings
about communities (). But, with mediatization’s successive
waves of mechanization, electrification and digitalization, further kinds of
collectivities gained relevance that we can call ‘collectivities of multi-modal
communication’. Based on and shaped by a diverse media ensemble, less rooted in
direct experience but in shared processes of mediated communication, these
‘collectivities of multi-modal communication’ become communities when they
build up a ‘common we’ as well as long-term structures. However, an important
characteristic of deep mediatization is the variable intensity
of such collectivities, and the role that choices between media
modalities (media options within the media manifold) play in the formation of
distinctive collectivities (what makes them ‘multi-modal’). Far from a general
switch-over to purely ‘personal’ networks, in an age of deep mediatization we
see a more differentiated range of collectivities, in part because
even older collectivities of co-presence have now become mediatized.
So far we have
discussed collectivities whose members are in interaction with each other. But
we also need to consider collectivities that are constructed through certain
ways of representing that collectivity. Thereby, a number
(smaller or larger) of people who are not in personal contact with each other
are nonetheless addressed simultaneously. Historically we can relate imagined
collectivities to religious communities, and later the nation as an ‘imagined
community’, constructed by print media and electronic mass media like radio and
television. The actors who constructed these collectivities were typically
powerful: churches, political state institutions and their representatives.
However, with deep mediatization, the ‘imagining’ of collectivity has became an
increasingly contested field.
Originally, the
nation as an ‘imagined community’ involved the idea of national public media as
crucial to the construction of this imagined community. In his enlightening
analysis, Benedict Anderson emphasized ‘the novel and the newspaper’ as ‘the
technical means for “re-presenting” the kind of imagined community that is the
nation’ (). In such a perspective the ‘development of
print-as-commodity’ is the key to understanding the construction of a
communicative space that offers the possibilities to imagine a ‘national
consciousness’ (). Electronic media later supplemented this
process – mainly radio and television – which gave ‘print allies unavailable a
century ago’ (). In this way, processes of communication
that allowed the construction of the nation were intensified.
However, it would
be a mistake to understand this mediated representation of the nation as an explicit discourse about the nation as a political
unit. Rather, it is a ‘banal nationalism’: a habitual representation of the
nation as a point of identification in a ‘mundane way’ ().
This process of construction works through how, in media, a ‘homeland’ is
articulated as a ‘here’ and the group of the people living in this homeland as
a ‘national we’. Contests and conflicts with other people become a competition
of ‘nations’, and even the weather is something that is automatically related
to a national territory. This ‘constant flagging’ of the nation ensures that,
‘whatever else is forgotten in a world of information overload, we do not
forget our homelands’ (). And even today this process of
constructing the world as a world of nations continues, for example in online
platforms that are not necessarily bound to a national territory (). For various kinds of political actors – politicians,
parties, governments, and journalists – the imagined community of the nation
remains the point of reference for constructing social order. This keeps the
imaginary of the nation as a ‘quasi-natural’ unit of living and identification:
‘It is a form of life in which “we” are constantly invited to relax, at home,
within the homeland’s borders’ ().
With
globalization in general and globalization of the media in particular, however,
such social imaginaries became weaker (). Besides the ‘project’ of constructing the nation as a
collectivity, other kinds of ‘projects’ of imagining collectivity became more
widespread. One prominent example for this is the ‘community of Europeans’ that
can be understood in parallel to the nation as a ‘community of communication’
(): it is imagined through collective processes of
communication. Here, the underlying communicative space is a transnational and multi-lingual public
sphere that emerges from the increasing discussion of European issues across
borders as well as an increasing monitoring of European political affairs in
Brussels (). While on the level of everyday experience
this kind of imagined collectivity has not the ‘natural’ character of the
nation, we can see under way an ongoing construction of a ‘banal’, however
contested, Europeanness ().
But such
alternative territorially related communities are only one way of imagining
collectivity. With deep mediatization we have a variety of other publics and
imagined collectivities that partly conflict with each other and partly connect
to each other (). This starts with ‘personal
publics’ () or ‘private spheres’ () grouped around certain individuals, and ends with the ‘networked publics’
() of digital platforms that are
characterized by a particular communicative architecture which enables these
spheres of communication (). Around some topics,
situational ‘issue publics’ () emerge across
various digital media, including the mobile phone itself (). What we can notice
here is a massive differentiation and multiplication of the different spaces of
political communication, shaped in particular by underlying inequalities of
socio-economic resources. This makes essential a ‘context-centered model’ of
media’s role in the formation of collectivities (). We
do not even know therefore the full variety of imagined collectivities that
such publics support, but we know they expand far beyond the confines or
reference points of national states or confederations.
To explore this
more closely it is helpful to consider the case of online blogging. What is
called the ‘blogosphere’ () is an online space of
bloggers who are more or less closely interrelated. Typically, these relations
become visualized as networks of technical () or
semantic links of (mutual) personal references (). The
main question here is what kinds of collectivities are built by these bloggers.
Partly, they are understood as a kind of ‘community of practice’ (), being preoccupied with a certain topic, referring more or less to each
other, and so building up an arena of discourse.9
However, we need again to ask how far the term ‘community’ is helpful, or
whether this collectivity is defined simply by the shared interest of the
involved bloggers. The situation becomes even more complicated if we consider
the bloggers’ readers. The ‘intense affective unification’ () of blogging on a certain topic can result in ‘online crowds’ with their
own dynamics: members of this collectivity come together on certain online
sites, imagining themselves as a kind of collectivity of political interest and
expressing their political position in affective ways.10 With such ‘online
crowding’ we are witnessing the unification and relative synchronization of publics in
relation to certain political issues through shared affective practices () and through a structure of feeling ().
The
multiplication of possible publics also multiplies the possibilities for
constructing types of imagined collectivities. The most prominent examples of
this are social movements. While social movements have a long-term history of imagining
collectivity – the most prominent example for this is the international
socialist movement – so-called ‘new’ social movements’ () like the environmental or alter-mondialization movement are
characterized by their global imaginations of collectivity
that move beyond any national or supra-national political units. With the
support of media, these movements aim at transformations on a global scale
(), offering new imaginations of collectivity based around shared
‘project identities’ () and offering ‘networks of hope’
(). However, there are good arguments to be cautious about such
claims. Social movements certainly have better resources for collectivity
building today than before digitalization: a prominent recent example for this
was the ‘occupy movement’.11
Yet, at the same time, the internet also offers political elites many
opportunities to intensify and diversify the ways in which they sustain
themselves in positions of power (). Therefore, the
transformative potential of new political collectivities might be far more
limited than their own imaginaries suggest. However, with digitalization the
actual character of social movements changes. There emerges a tension between
more loosely connected, individualized forms of political action on the one
hand, and new ways of actually constructing political collectivity on the
other. While the two seem contradictory at first glance, a second look shows
that both are an expression of the changing figurations of social movements and
their imaginations of collectivity.
In an important
book W. Lance Bennett and Alexandra Segerberg describe this shift in social
movements as being from a ‘logic of collective action’ to a ‘logic of
connective action’ (). With digital media
platforms, they argue, we can distinguish three kinds of social movement
figurations: first, there is ‘collective action’ which takes place in
figurations of ‘organizationally brokered networks’, characterized by a strong
organizational coordination of action. Media technologies are used to manage
participation and coordinate the organizational goals as well as the communication
of other aims. Second, there is ‘connective action’ realized by
organizationally enabled networks with a looser coordination of action: media
technologies support communicative practices that enable more personalized forms of
action. And third, there is ‘connective action’ that is supported by
crowd-enabled networks with little or no formal organizational coordination.
Here, we have a large-scale personal access to multi-layered media technologies
and communication centred on emergent personal action. While this threefold
distinction is certainly idealized, it addresses the diverse consequences of
digital media for the structure of social movements today: digital platforms
support both hierarchically organized social movements and a highly individualized political engagement that
is more ‘me-centric’ ().
But we have to be
very careful not to confuse this possible shift with a disappearance of
imaginations of collectivity. Even much looser figurations remain dedicated to
the construction of imagined (political) collectivities. In a careful analysis,
Anastasia Kavada () demonstrated this for the Occupy movement, which
involved protests without formal organization, supported by a very open
figuration of activists linked by protest and media-based communications
practices. In such an open figuration ‘social media followers formed an outer
ring while the inner ring included activists who were participating regularly
in the physical occupations’ (). Through the use of digital
media platforms, it became possible to construct two kinds of collectivities:
first, the collectivity of the group protesting in the streets and parks, and
second, a collectivity that followed the events (a kind of imagined
collectivity of supporters). Occupy became a movement with transnational impact
in part because it offered symbolic resources
for imagining oneself as part of such a wider collectivity, and in so doing
supported its own spread beyond the figurations of local protests. Such more
open structures of organizing protest do not result in a default to ‘me-centric
protest’ but rather in a more varied imaginary of ‘protest collectivity’ (). All can find a place within this collectivity of those
who define themselves as part of the ‘99 percent’ movement against global
capitalism.
Social movements
are now aware how important media technologies are for social processes in
general and for collectivity building in particular. As a result, they consider
media and media infrastructures themselves increasingly as an object of political engagement. Roots of this can be
found in the ‘alternative’ and ‘radical’ media movements of the 1970s () that aimed to achieve ‘alternative’ forms of public spheres
(). With reference to network infrastructure
and digital media, important examples are the ‘hacker movement’ and the ‘open
source movement’. The hacker movement’s political aim was to make the
implications of the increasing omnipresence of computers and datafication publicly
known and thereby politically negotiable (). The focus of the ‘open
source movement’ was first to foster a certain form of non-proprietary software
development; later it became a political movement intertwined with a general
political engagement in ‘open access’ to information: the ‘open data movement’
(). A remarkable hybrid example is the Chaos Computer Club, one of
the world’s largest and Europe’s oldest hacker organizations (). More recent examples include the technologically driven ‘repair
movement’, combining hackers’ competences with an engagement for sustainability
and a zero growth economy (Kannengießer, forthcoming). Collectivities like
these not only use media and their infrastructure
to support their engagement for particular political aims; they consider media
and their infrastructure as themselves an issue
of political engagement.
This focus of
certain movement collectivities on contesting media is a general
characteristic of an era of deep mediatization: in such an era, media, and ways
of reflecting on media, become part of the stuff out of which the social world
is built and so, for example, larger collectivities come together as such. Prominent recent examples are the
‘media-related pioneer communities’ () like the ‘quantified self
movement’ () or the ‘makers
movement’ ().12 While they call
themselves ‘movements’, these collectivities are instead hybrids between social
movements and think tanks. Like social movements, pioneer communities have
informal networks, a collective identity, and a shared aim for action. More
particularly, they come very close to ‘technology-oriented and product-oriented
movements’ (), like the open-source movement (). However, pioneer communities are generally not involved in
conflict-driven relations with identifiable opponents as social movements are:
indeed, they are more open to forms of entrepreneurship and policymaking,
lending them an affinity with think tanks (). Pioneer communities here share with think tanks
an ability to produce ideas, and an effort to influence both public and
policymakers.
The imaginaries
that characterize all these collectivities are
oriented to media
technologies. The ‘quantified self movement’ imagines better forms of
healthcare through collective self-measurement and the accumulation of personal
and collective data. The ‘makers movement’ imagines that new technologies will
allow decentralized forms of production and new collectivities of value
creation that will supplant traditional forms of (industrial) production. Such
pioneer communities spread their imaginaries transculturally.13
We could continue
our analysis and discuss many further examples, whether religious collectivities14 or transnational
political violence, which have become more and more based on building
collectivity through media.15
But again the point we want to make is a more general one: that we are
experiencing a shift in how collectivities are imagined for political ends.
While the imagining of collectivity through media was for a long time
predominantly related to imagining the nation, we are nowadays confronted with
much more diverse and conflicting processes of imagination that can no longer
easily be integrated into the container of well-integrated ‘national projects’.
Looking back, the project of imagining the nation depended on a close fit with
the waves of mechanization and electrification and with the nationally based
media infrastructure on which they were based, whether we turn to France, the
USA, or colonial Nigeria (). The high
point of the communicative construction of the nation was in the second half of
the twentieth century. With deep mediatization, and its more diversely
configured media infrastructures, political projects for imagining
collectivities become themselves more diverse, even contradictory.
Two points are
striking. First, the communicative spaces of constructing these imagined
collectivities are increasingly detached from territorial borders. This does
not mean that the project of imagining national communities has come to an end.
But such imaginations are increasingly confronted with mediatized ‘old’ and
‘new’ imaginations of collectivity: supranational
imaginaries jostle for prominence with national imaginaries, while social
movements offer new imaginations of transnational and transcultural political
belonging, and new types of media-oriented collectivity emerge. A
characteristic of deep mediatization is the existence in parallel of these conflicting imaginations of
collectivity and the unresolvable diversity of political values and political
projects that results.
Second, the close
relation between our imaginaries of collective life and media becomes
taken-for-granted. First steps in such a direction are the various social
movements that focus on media and their infrastructures as a political issue.
Maybe more characteristic for deep mediatization are the media-related pioneer communities which
call themselves ‘movements’ but are more closely tied to existing power
centres. Their imaginings of collectivity involve ideas of living better
together, through and by media technologies: those imaginings are effected not
just by circulating media, but by a much broader range of practices focused on
media that constitute what Hilde Stephansen calls the ‘social foundations’ of
publics (). In our terminology, media-related practices enable
new types of publicly significant figurations to be formed. With deep
mediatization these imaginings become concrete political projects, based in the
material infrastructure of media and communciations.
There is one
further characteristic of contemporary collectivity that must be discussed. By
this we mean collectivities whose construction involves various forms of
mediated communication and datafication, but without communitization.
Such ‘collectivities without communitization’ are frequently driven by
corporate interests, and relate in particular to ‘digital work’: that is, kinds
of labour that are undertaken in the sphere of digital media, often without the
individuals involved understanding this as work. Such
collectivities take various forms.
We can trace this
development back to the idea of ‘brand communities’. At first sight these are
very close to the features of fan cultures, being collectivities built around
certain (media) products or even (think of Apple) the producing companies
themselves. However, it is worth looking more closely at this phenomenon. In
their original sense brand communities were specialized, non-geographically
bound communities, based on a structured set of social relationships among
admirers of a brand (). They were ‘largely
imagined communities’ () insofar as their
horizon was not just the artefact of a certain kind of product (a computer or a
car) but the brand that this artefact represents. The fundamental point about
brand communities is that they cannot be ‘made’ by companies but are rooted in
the everyday practices of those who use these brands (). Nowadays, such collectivities go beyond the companies’ own strategies
of marketing and encompass the mediated communication of the members of the
community. Such brand communities are not ‘sub’ or ‘fan cultures’ because their members see
themselves not as something ‘special’ or ‘marginal’ but as general consumers
with an interest for a certain kind of accepted brand
(); even so, as with fan communities, the
community-building itself takes place by interaction either at physical
meetings or online ().
Building up brand
communities became, paradoxically, a top-down strategy
of marketing, which resulted in ‘brand collectivities’ with a far lower level
of communitization. The possibilities of digital platforms stimulated companies
to experiment with ‘online groups’ of consumers in order to foster
relationships between and to them (). The parallel relationship that consumers have to a common brand
creates already a figuration, albeit one characterized by an intense asymmetry.
The hope of corporations is often to support the development of more reliable
consumer relationships (), but, when
they do so, something different takes place: the construction of a visible and
therefore meaningful collectivity of ‘followers’ who do not necessarily
perceive this figuration as involving ‘community’. There is a big difference
between those who just ‘like’ the web pages of certain brands on digital
platforms, and the brandrelated groups on these platforms founded by the users
themselves (). The first group shares only a positive view
of a brand, but is represented as a collectivity
through data accumulation. In the second case there is an interaction from the
bottom up between people who not only share an interest for this brand and its
products, but also develop a joint discourse about it, and potentially a
relation to each other (). Only the latter is close to the
original idea of ‘brand communities’.
With deep mediatization
and the expansion of mediated interdependence that it brings, this first kind
of brand collectivity becomes more widespread, especially in the corporate
sector. But companies increasingly want to encourage forms of collective
practice that create value in more tangible ways: online ‘collectivities of
work’ which involve people outside formal employment or organizational
membership, in the interactive production of data-flows and activity-streams
from which commercial value can be extracted. Let’s leave aside the intense
debate about the status of this sort of labour or ‘playbor’ (),16 and focus on the underlying sociological question: what sort of collectivities does such ‘work’ construct on a
massive scale? Take the case of so-called ‘brand volunteering’ (). It is performed by a complex set of figurations: the figurations
of local brand communities (‘clubs’ with an interest for a certain brand)
become linked to the figurations of online platforms and marketing campaigns to build up a certain
collectivity of work. One study researched brand volunteering around a car
company: anything like community only emerged at the local brand groups or
during face-to-face events (). ‘Brand volunteering’ is marked
by many tensions; mistrust by the supporters for the overall strategy of the
company; feelings of being exploited. Nevertheless, the interest in the brand which motivates some members of
brand communities to become ‘brand volunteers’ requires that the figuration
built around the brand, and the broader context in which this ‘invitation to
work’ occurs, is strong enough at least to encourage people to devote their
scarce time to ‘collective’ projects oriented towards a reference-point that is
abstract, a representation of a value.
For other
‘collectivities of work’ not even this is the case. They are built around
online platforms to which individuals contribute ‘work’ as a collectivity of
‘online workers’ with little or no possibility of direct interaction with each
other (they are not in this sense a ‘community’): for example, platforms which
integrate individual contributions (rating platforms for people, restaurants,
locations etc.) or platforms that link services that individuals offer
(accommodation, rides etc.). In both cases these platforms are typically
marketed as ‘cost saving’ and ‘democratizing’, but they are just as plausibly
seen as forms of unpaid exploitation. The basic idea of rating platforms is
that a company offers an online infrastructure to evaluate certain services.
The unpaid work individuals do is to contribute their assessment to a public
forum, with the assumed bonus that other users are paying attention to
reviewers’ opinions. Such platforms then function as ‘a reflexive feedback
loop’ (), both reflecting popular sentiments about
specific services and helping to form those sentiments. From this perspective
the actors and roles in this figuration are clearly defined by the supposed
‘benefit’ for all involved. The providers of this platform financially benefit by selling the information produced
by this platform: the review-writers supposedly benefit by having the
opportunity to express their opinion, and the readers, presumably, think they
benefit by getting the latest information.
There is no
communitization in this collectivity of (unpaid) work, whose outputs are sold
by the platform operators. On the contrary, it can be argued that such
collectivities of work have the side-effect of undermining community. See for
example Zukin, Lindeman and Hurson’s () research on a rating platform for
restaurants and clubbing locations that undermined existing community
structures through the way it reinforced symbolic and other forms of privilege
embedded in the practices of its ‘workers’. Far from being communitization, the
side effects of this ‘collectivity
of work’ may work to undermine actual processes of community building
elsewhere. Similar dynamics operate in platforms that link together services
that individuals offer (accommodation, car rides etc.). Such brokerage
platforms are part of a ‘sharing economy’ (). The
model of such platforms is to offer a convenient interface that matches supply
and demand in trusted ways ().17 Such platforms have
had far-reaching success in such varied areas as accommodation, car rides or
jobs ().18 We can understand
the collectivities structured around these platforms as ‘collectivities of
work’ insofar as their members offer their hospitality, transport service or
data labour for financial gain. But again such figurations are structured
primarily around corporate platforms in order to make profit, with disturbing
side-effects: for example, patterns of race segregation on accommodation
platforms, including differential rates of remuneration driven by the automated
collection of ethnicity data generated from the pictures users post of
themselves (). We do not deny that, in some civil
society platforms based on ‘sharing economy’ – including those close to social
movements such as OpenStreetMaps () – the work is much less
individualized and based on social movements and local groups with specific
interests in such alternative platforms. Our point however concerns the general
trend, which is dominated by the commercially successful platforms that follow
a different kind of dynamic.
Other platforms
produce a ‘crowd’ of low-skilled digital labourers who perform vast numbers of
minor data tasks and are paid small amounts of money for this ‘microwork’
(). Such platforms organize digital workers to fit the needs
of datafication. Service requesters post a ‘task’ that then can be performed by
the ‘microworkers’, in accordance with the requirements of the programming or
digital industries. On this model ‘humans (are) made into modular,
protocol-defined computational services’ (), working on a
large scale and in a fully monitorable way. Here, we start to see how the vast
data infrastructure on which deep mediatization is based generates its own costs in terms of hidden forms of exploitative
labour. Meanwhile, those forms of labour are themselves only possible on the
basis of new types of figurations: collectivities without community.
Through these forms of labour, individuals literally become part of the datafication process: ‘humans-as-a-service’
().
There is a second
way in which today’s data infrastructure generates new types of collectivity:
‘numeric inclusion’ (). There is nothing new about
quantifying media audiences () or national populations ().
But with datafication, precise measurement at one data-point can be calibrated,
almost in real time, to information stored (or simultaneously gathered) in
myriad other databases to produce instant categorization and ‘appropriate’
action. Based on the digital traces we all leave online, groupings of people
who share certain characteristics are continuously produced to support the
advertising industry’s aim of reaching individuals with customised advertising
(). This accumulation of data is
subsequently communicated back to the individuals: by online shops that produce
lists of the other goods people making the same purchase bought; by online
radio stations that produce charts, access statistics and rankings with
reference to certain tastes of their users; by news pages that offer further
information based on the previous reading choices of other users etc. Processes
of ‘numeric inclusion’ therefore work to construct collectivities that ‘would
not be possible without the measurement and activity assessments delegated to
algorithms and statistical programs’ (). What is
constructed here is an accumulation of individuals who are
treated as sharing characteristics within networked processes of ‘big data’
processing.
‘Numeric
inclusion’, however, when embedded back into daily practice, stimulates the
construction for instrumental purposes of a meaningful horizon – mainly of
taste, interest and orientation19
– within which individuals may come to position
themselves as members of a certain collectivity:20
those categorized as liking the same band, or the same type of book, or any
other categorized feature. But such collectivities based on ‘numeric inclusion’
are generated without (or with very limited) communitization: indeed, there is
no reference-point whatsoever for any affective relation to the collectivity’s
other members, who remain hidden from each other, except via the assumption that they too were categorized the same way.
Nevertheless, these collectivities are potentially influential: they represent
large numbers of persons who have been constructed for important purposes as part of the same category, and who may orient their
actions accordingly. To that extent, these collectivities too are an incipient
contribution to an emerging social order.
At this stage it
is an open question how much such collectivities formed by ‘numeric inclusion’
– that is, by datafication – might have in common with the media-based and
mediatized local collectivities discussed at the beginning of this chapter.
They would seem to be at opposite ends of the expanded spectrum of mediated
collectivity in an age of deep mediatization. Are there practices emerging that
might link up these different types of collectivity, and so transform the
nature of communitization still further?
One important
such practice is the embedding into everyday life of robotics, or rather
‘social robotics’: the ‘placement of robots in human social spaces’ (). At present, the most widespread forms of these ‘social robots’
are not physical artefacts but ‘assistant apps’ that can be associated with our
smartphones (). Such apps
are presented to us as quasi-human interaction partners with whom (through
voice-recognition software) we can communicate using our natural voice. In
reality, however, such ‘assistants’ are interfaces to large computer networks that
process the questions we might ask and give ‘answers’ by reference to their
comparability to an available dataset of questions and answers, combined with
the data we have inputted. Through such a relationship we become a living,
interactive member of a collectivity without community.
We can easily
imagine face-to-face communities of people in such ‘relationships’ who come
together to compare their experience of them. This may be only one of many
entry-points for social robotics into the domain of social interaction: there
has been much discussion of care-giving robots, or the robot puppets in
dementia care,21
but just as relevant are ‘smart’ living environments and ‘smart’ self-driving
cars and trains. Already, key aspects of smartphones and smart watches train us
to communicate with systems of this sort.
There is of
course no simple global story of how such new technologically mediated ways of
constructing collectivity are everywhere transforming ‘the world’, ‘our world’
or ‘anyone’s world’: such stories remain rhetorics which mask
hugely uneven processes that, in turn, are deeply implicated in underlying
inequalities of socio-economic resource, which indeed they help deepen.22 Such rhetorics, even
if already normalized in pioneer communities and the like, rely on very
particular notions of ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ that reduce most sites of
everyday life across the globe to ‘sites of replication of a
future invented prior and elsewhere’, as a recent analysis of IT practices in Peru notes
().
Our aim in
registering some of the practices entangled with such rhetorics has absolutely not been to reproduce those rhetorics. But it would be
equally dangerous not to acknowledge such pressures towards transformation,
since they amount to nothing less than an attempt to transform our models of
the social, a deeply motivated adjustment in the very basis of collectivity. As
Sherry Turkle () puts it: ‘even before we make the
robots, we remake ourselves as people ready to be their
companions’. If this is so, we have no choice but, in important ways, to remake
our collectivities and potentially our socialities too. But what are the wider costs?
What are the consequences for the possibility of social order? These are the
questions to which we turn in the book’s last two chapters.
We now reach the
double question on which this book has been converging: what sort of order does contemporary social life have? And what is
the role of media, in the broadest sense, in constructing and sustaining that
order?
We propose here
only a minimal, basic notion of ‘social order’. By ‘order’, we mean a
relatively stable pattern of interdependences between not just individuals,
groups and institutions, but also (at a higher dimension) between the numerous
types of relation involved in social life that all depend on larger stabilities
of resource and infrastructure. We do not mean by ‘order’
here two familiar notions: one is a functionalist notion of social life, on
whatever scale, seen as a homeostatic and self-sustaining order in which
countless processes, values and actions all seamlessly contribute to the wider
end of social functioning (); the other is a social order
operating solely at the level of ‘national containers’ called ‘societies’ (). Indeed, at no point has our argument depended on the
assumption that we live in societies that constitute ‘distinct, discrete
entities forming coherent wholes or systems’ (), or that
indeed media form corresponding discrete and coherent systems. Instead, we
insist on the plurality of social ‘centres’, indeed on the regular contestation
over the construction and definition of social life, and the plurality of
competing values that underlie such contests ().
But this position is perfectly consistent with acknowledging that some degree of order, in the basic sense we propose, is
necessary if social life is to be livable at all: for if every level of human activity and interrelations were
the subject of endless and explicit contestation, there would be an unlivable
chaos, captured by Hobbes’ Leviathan. In every way of life therefore that is
minimally successful, there is a degree of social ‘order’, and identifying and
analysing this is, as Dennis Wrong () argued twenty years ago in The Problem of Order, the fundamental question of
social theory.
Our key theme
throughout has been interrelatedness as the basic
feature of the
social world, and the importance of analysing interrelatedness on all scales
through the arrangements of particular figurations, based on a distinctive
organization of material resource. Interrelatedness already points us towards the question of order, since as Elias himself
noted in relation to civilization (his term), this ‘happened by and large
unplanned, but it did not happen without a specific type of order’ (). In this chapter therefore our question becomes: what does deep mediatization (the penetration of mediated
processes into how the very elements of social life are formed and sustained)
contribute specifically to the type of order that
today is possible? Our understanding here of social order – as basically,the
higher-dimensional ‘settlement’ that enables a minimal level of stability under
particular conditions – leaves open two further questions, both carrying
normative implications.
The first
question concerns the relative benefits of the various types of order
possible under the same basic material conditions. As Dennis Wrong
points out, there are various readings of how social order is possible in
social and political theory: force, mutual self-interest, and norms. Since few
would assume that mutual self-interest is sufficient to found social order, the
key choice is between ‘force’ and ‘norms’. Since in this book we reject
functionalist readings of social order in which the causal role of norms is
dominant (the Parsonian reading of a norm-based integrative social order), our
starting-point is always to give some explanatory role to ‘force’. But when we
consider deep mediatization, a new question arises. Media certainly provide a
way of reinforcing and focusing norms that are already in circulation, and perhaps
of inventing new norms. Media also provide a cognitive background against which
selves (and collectivities of selves) can pursue their interests. What then is
the relation between media infrastructures and force? Is one consequence of
today’s data infrastructure perhaps, as foreshadowed in Chapter 7, to install a new type of force into social life, an authoritarian
structure of compulsion linked to our increasing dependence on that
infrastructure for the conditions of basic life? If so, how orderly can the
social results of such force be long-term, especially if its operations become
increasingly divorced from certain important norms that ground institutional
legitimacy in various ways? That is a key question raised by radical changes in
how social interrelatedness today works that appear to flow from deep mediatization. Is it possible that the balance of pressures that constitute social order is
today changing, and that the interrelations constituted and underpinned by
media infrastructures are important to that change? We certainly cannot rule
out such change, unless we rely on the Parsonian assumption that social orders
are inevitably and broadly stable, which Elias firmly rejected (). We
need, in other words, to take seriously today’s potential pressures towards
‘disorder’ () on smaller or larger scales.
The second
question is about value, and how particular forms of
order do, or do not, fit with particular overarching values. ‘Order’ is something
in which, as humans, we have a stake, but not just any sort of order:
different orders generate different types of benefit, cost and contradiction,
and those varying outcomes may be judged positive or negative. The ways in
which we are embedded in a ‘world’ carry a moral and ethical charge because they are integral to our resources and horizons
of action, both spatial and temporal. It is only insofar as the social world
‘hangs together’ to a certain degree that we can become fully
embedded in it, but each form of order brings distinctive costs that affect
people unevenly. Here a critical phenomenology has a distinctive contribution
to make. We have argued that, under conditions of deep mediatization, the role
of media is precisely to mould how the social world
hangs together at every level, to mould key elements from
which it is constituted. This is very different from the view of
classic social phenomenology, that the social world’s hanging together is the
upshot, in large part, of human beings’ ‘mindedness’
(). What if, as suggested already in Chapter 7, pressures towards
datafication – new planes of action generated through automated processes of
data collection and processing – constitute an externally generated
type of ‘mindedness’ that is radically different from that of the pre-digital
age? We already register this when we legal theorists point out that the
system-based ‘mindedness’ of vast calculative capacity, when let loose on large
amounts of anonymous data, can easily de-anonymise identity (), so
that individuals become recognizable and retrievable via algorithms, in ways
completely contrary to the intention of the human actors involved in the
original data collection. What implications does this have for the type of
social order that is today emerging, and for whether it fits with values such
as recognition and freedom? In generating such questions, phenomenology becomes
a critical science, a register of potential ethical and
political challenges emerging within our ways of life with media.
Crucial to
phenomenology, understood this way, is recognizing the power that may accrue to
the institutions that, as Luc Boltanski put it, determine ‘the whatness of what
is’ (). The deep embedding of data processes in everyday life, for
example, gives new force to the interactivity of social classifications and has
the potential to mould social reality itself; as Espeland and Sauder () put
it in the title of their article, ‘public measures recreate social worlds’. But
datafication is just one aspect of the normative consequences of the emerging
social order. There are also the increasing pressures deriving from the sheer
complexity of today’s web of interdependences that media have served to
intensify. Once again, Elias provides a useful perspective. Late in his career,
reviewing the increasing complexity of figurations in large societies, Norbert
Elias reflected on the possibility of general ‘fluctuations in what might be called
“social pressure”, in particular the “internal pressure” in a society’ (). Can this perhaps be relevant today? As linked infrastructures of
communications grow in scope and intensity, and as the figurations – and
figurations of figurations – built on the back of those infrastructures create
stable connections between larger and larger domains of action, creating new forms of coordinated social action – so the ‘pressure’
that can materialize at any one nodal point, and for the actors associated with
that point, increases exponentially. Time-pressures are a particularly clear,
if not the only, way into registering this increase in general pressure, and
the costs it generates; those costs affect actors unevenly, creating new forms
of inequality regarding time and other resources. At the same time, such
intensified patterns of interdependence create new opportunities for
coordinated complex action.
These are some of
the aspects of social order under conditions of deep mediatization that we will
try to unpack in this chapter. If we manage to do so, we will complete our
survey of the mediated construction of reality, but this involves taking our
argument to a still more complex level: a level that seems abstract but in
reality directly affects the fabric of our personal lives. We are encouraged by
Elias’ defence of complexity in What is Sociology?
The indices of complexity set out here may perhaps help to make everyday matters appear rather strange. This is necessary if one is to understand why sociology’s field of investigation – the processes and structures of interweaving, the figurations formed by the actions of interdependent people, in short, societies – is a problem at all. ()
Building on the
earlier chapters of this Part, we will approach this difficult question of
order, first from the point of view of ‘selves’ and ‘collectivities’, and then
from the point of view of ‘organizations’ as particular figurations of order,
before turning for the first time to the even more complex level of
‘government’. We will turn explicitly to the questions of value generated by
this analysis in the next, concluding chapter.
Before we
consider in detail how deep mediatization might affect the types of social
order that are now possible, we need to make as explicit as possible the
hermeneutic approach to social understanding that underlies our argument in
this chapter and book, and underlies materialist phenomenology, indeed all
phenomenologies. In the contemporary social world, the production of social
knowledge has reached a paradoxical point: where it denies itself as knowledge,
where those who claim to ‘know’ about the social claim routes to such knowledge
which have nothing in common with how social knowledge has been produced in the
past. Yet this is not accidental, but derives from particular forms of symbolic
power linked to the data infrastructure on which deep mediatization depends. We
are in the middle of a ‘changing relationship between ways of knowing and forms
of power’ (), indeed an attempt to create a ‘global
culture of knowing’data processing (), which is intimately
linked to particular corporate ambitions. Under these circumstances, a
hermeneutic approach to the social becomes all the more important.
Some writers see
this transformation as the signal that a revolution in the human and social
sciences is needed to integrate data-processing techniques, a necessary
‘rupture’ that ‘accepts the digital imperative’ (). But
this goes much too far, since it ignores the long conflict between theories of
communication which see information as just ‘bits’ that must be transmitted
freely and without friction () and an approach that
considers the ‘meaning of information from an interpretative point of view’
(). While big data approaches to social knowledge do not
depend on any theory of communication, they do depend on ignoring the contextual nature of information, its need
to be interpreted, and indeed its source in a world that is situated and interpretative. It is essential therefore
to insist on just this aspect of knowledge if we are to have any grasp of what
is at stake in battles to define the contemporary social order.
Influential
claims on behalf of big data-processing techniques as a new, radically improved form of social knowledge () aim
to outlaw older projects of interpreting social reality from the perspective of
situated human beings. Social reality – indeed the reality known by the
physical sciences too – is simply too complex, Anderson claims, for
interpretation, theory or taxonomy. Though controversial, derided even in some
quarters, what matters about such claims is that they offer a blueprint for claims to ‘knowledge’ that
legitimize completely new types of knowledge producer, knowledge institution
and mechanism for funding knowledge production: a new social order of knowledge, we might say. This social
order of knowledge is, as we saw in Chapter 9, embedded in various practices: those for
example of ‘pioneer communities’ that are gaining influence on individuals and
institutions in the health sector. We should not underestimate the force of the
processes whereby new types of ‘knowledge’ production based on collecting,
aggregating and processing data across countless sites get normalized. There is
no more effective way for a new method of knowledge production to become
installed into social order than through banal repetition. As Schutz and
Luckmann wrote, our everyday lives depend on a large degree of order: ‘so long
as the structure of the world can be taken to be constant, as long as my
previous experience is valid, my ability to operate upon the world in this and
that manner remains in principle preserved’ (). When the nature of
that order changes, the foundations of social life change too.
The casualty,
potentially, in this shift to a new social order of knowledge is the
hermeneutic perspective on which Schutz and Luckmann’s whole understanding of
the social depends. Their book The Structures of the Life
World starts out from a definition of ‘the everyday lifeworld’ as
‘the region of reality in which man can engage himself and which can change
while he operates in it by means of his animate organism’ (). They
understand the lifeworld (which we prefer to call ‘social world’) as the sphere
in which human beings act through engagement with that world, that is, by exercising
their ability to interpret it. This hermeneutic approach to the
nature of knowledge is so fundamental that we find it shared by the early
twentieth-century biologist Jakob von Uexküll who around the same time as
Schutz developed the notion of Umwelt, but in this
case to understand the worlds of animals in general, not just humans. A key
part of each animal’s Umwelt, or ‘environment’, was for von Uexküll the signs
that it contained for that animal, signs that denote,
according to von Uexküll’s translator, ‘the way in which the subject organizes
its Umwelt through selective perception of those
features’ (). In case there
is any doubt that this is a hermeneutic approach to animal lifeworlds, von
Uexküll himself writes that ‘the question as to meaning must
therefore have priority in all living beings’ ().
This hermeneutic
reading of social order is itself under challenge from a particular direction
of social life: the approach to self-knowledge and social knowledge that van
Dijck calls ‘dataism’. By this, she means an ideological reshaping of datafication into ‘a
widespread belief in the objective quantification and potential tracking of all
kinds of human behaviour and sociality through online media technologies’
(), which enables continuous recording and accumulation of data that
can be translated readily into numbers. What can never be translated into
numbers is the perspective of the interpreter herself, her situated position in
a field of past action and interpretation that informs any new action and
interpretation. So dataism is directly opposed to a
phenomenological approach to knowledge, including social knowledge: indeed it
is an ‘anti-hermeneutic’ whose emergence in contemporary social life needs
itself to be interpreted and understood (). Dataism denies not
only a crucial aspect of how we interpret the social world, but a capacity of
human beings in general to develop what philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer called
‘historically effected consciousness’ (). This consciousness
derives from our particular way of being embedded in the social world and
builds out from each interpreter’s ‘situation’ in the
social world: hermeneutics as interpretative knowledge are based in the
individual’s and group’s ‘action of being in the world’ (). But Gadamer also recognizes the possibility of ‘the alienation of the
interpreter from the interpreted’ through ‘a false objectification’ (). Writing forty years ago, Gadamer attributed this to the influence of
natural science methods, but dataism is a strong contemporary version of such
alienation that paradoxically claims to be a new type of social knowledge ().
While the
supposed benefits of such datafied knowledge are open to debate, the costs are
absolutely clear: a social fabric built out of continuous mutual surveillance.
The price of datafication is beautifully captured in Dave Eggers’ novel The Circle in the paradoxical image of a system for
integrating the cameras worn by millions of people across the world called
‘SEECHANGE’: ‘this is ultimate transparency. No filter. See everything.
Always.’ (). Yet the philosophy of ‘dataism’ provides no
foundation whatsoever for grasping the social order which has generated its
deeply limited perspective on social knowledge. To do so we must start
somewhere else; we must return to the questions of materialist phenomenology.
We considered in Chapters 8 and 9 various ways in which the
practices of the self and of collectivities change with deep mediatization. In
this chapter we return to this perspective, but ask a different question: what
do such changed
practices (at the level of selves and collectivities) imply about how social order is today constituted in and through media?
At the core of this lie the implications for changing forms of social order of
the increasing institutionalization of individual
and group life.
At the start of
the book we noted the early medieval precedent for how fundamental changes in
media practices – new practices of literacy and reading, storing and
transporting texts – were associated with a newly individuated self (). We are too early in the transformations of the wave of
digitalization to see established any clear shifts in the nature of the self,
as we saw in Chapter 8, but there
are certainly visible some shifts in the relation between self-maintenance and
wider social order.
The self is a
temporal project, unfolding in time. But as Hartmut Rosa () shows, for complex reasons including the massive acceleration in the
transmission of communications, the self’s social domains have been transformed,
affording a new ‘horizon of possibility’ for the individual actor, that in turn
brings a divergence between her ‘horizon of expectation’ (the time she can
anticipate and which orients her) and her ‘space of experience’ (her sphere of
immediate action). Indeed, each actor’s social domains have also been extended
considerably. As a result, actors, through their technologically mediated
interface with others, regularly have to balance competing demands and
expectations across long time-scales: in other words, simply to function as a
self, the individual actor has to coordinate with larger numbers of people over
longer periods of time, and with more fine-grained coordination (). The result is a greater intensity of interdependence
between social actors, whether or not they know each other well (as in families
and friendships), and a greater dependence
of each individual on media and their infrastructures
that sustain the possibilities of such coordination. In both ways, the entanglement
of individuals in wider order, and their ability to contribute to it negatively
or positively, are increased. In addition, the increasing ability to receive
communications and informational resources from a distance, to manage
relationships at a distance through technologically mediated communications,
and indeed to travel physically over long distances, shifts the relation
between space and action, so that according to Rosa ‘space has lost its
property of immutable givenness, of being an unchangeable background condition’
(). In this respect too, the individual may find her firm anchoring
in everyday routines challenged and disrupted, as the relation between assumed
foreground and assumed background in social life becomes transformed. In this
context, social media platforms – and their ability to sustain relations with a large group of close and distant consociates – are
no trivial contribution to the order of everyday life than otherwise.
In such a context
of intensified translocal communications, new ‘relations between people and
vast arrangements of technologies and conventions’ have become banal, as Isin
and Ruppert note, including ‘tweeting, messaging, friending, emailing,
blogging, sharing’ (). By becoming banal and habitual, these once
strange activities lose, as Schutz and Luckmann put it, ‘their character of
acts’ (), entering the domain of the natural. In various ways,
individuals now participate in the wider task in which corporations are also
engaged: the task of managing continuity between people,
situations, locations and contexts. In what Gerlitz and Helmond () call the
‘like economy’, the traces of what social actors do on social media platforms
are distributed across the web in ways that further integrate it within an
economic functionality. Writing of Facebook’s ‘introduction of social Plugins
and the Open Graph’ earlier in the decade, they note: ‘Facebook activities such
as liking, commenting and sharing are no longer confined to the platform but
are distributed across the web and enable users to connect a wider range of web
content to their profiles’ ().
Once again Dave
Eggers’ novel The Circle offers an insight, when a character
criticizes another character for writing an entry about a walk in her
manuscript diary:
my problem with paper is that all communication dies with it. It holds no possibility of continuity [. . .]. It ends with you. Like you’re the only one who matters [. . .] but if you’d been using a tool that would help confirming the identity of whatever birds you saw, then anyone can benefit [. . .] Knowledge is lost every day through this sort of shortsightedness. ()
In Eggers’ novel
the pressure to ‘participate’, and so create ‘social knowledge’, becomes unbearable
for various characters for whom the corporate slogans of the Circle – ‘sharing
is caring’ or, more grandly, ‘equal access to all possible human experience is
a basic human right’ () – provide little comfort.
The question
indeed is access for whom. Any access that
individuals gain to others’ experience must, on this datafied model, always be
mediated through the ordering operations of a platform and data infrastructure
whose harvest is corporately owned. Participation involves therefore cooperation
in something collective, but only in a highly mediated sense: as Ulises Mejias
puts it, it is a contribution ‘to the social order’ (), that is,
the social order sustained by and for corporations, a point we will explain more
in a later section. If a self needs to sustain certain relations to a data
infrastructure in order to sustain herself as a self, this is an entirely new way of binding selves into a social order.
The individual’s place in social relations becomes itself dependent on the good
functioning of corporate infrastructure, and of the individual’s managed
relations with that infrastructure. What van Dijck calls ‘the imperative of
sharing’ () matches, on a different level, ‘l’impératif numérique’. Associated with the imperative
of sharing is a process of institutionalization: the self, in performing its
basic functions, becomes inherently institutionalized, reliant upon, and in
part referent to, the goals and demands of external, generally commercial, institutions.
Or, as the Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood put in in her review of The Circle: ‘what happens to us if we must be “on” all
the time? Then we’re in the twenty-four-hour glare of the supervised prison’
().
Not that ‘being
outside’ of this circle is the answer: indeed it constitutes a new and deep
form of exclusion, insofar as it is not voluntary. As in all processes of
institutionalization, but to an extent commensurate with the degree of
functional integration being attempted here, this process excludes a substantial class of people. In 2015, the
Unreported Britain project noted a ‘digital catch-22’ whereby the resources to get out of unemployment and other forms of
socio-economic exclusion themselves depend on already having the continuous and
high-quality online connection that those without jobs cannot have (). Whatever the hype, and even in a rich country such
as the UK, 14 per cent of households still lack internet access ().
Can we see a
broader pattern here? We believe we can. Norms – one of Wrong’s three
mechanisms for sustaining social order – are particularly important in
sustaining what, otherwise, would be an improbably complex and diverse set of
relations. At the level of production, platforms have to be maintained within a
wider space of ‘seamless interoperabilty’ () that
enables communicative practices to occur, and economic value to be generated
without obstacle, across many different platforms and applications: that, in
turn, requires an overlapping of system-norms within the various interlinking
software packages. At the level of the user, some norms of behaviour are
expected in order to encourage a regularity of data flow:
the power of norms, in the area of sociality, is much more influential than the power of law and order [. . .] in less than a decade, the norms for online sociality have dramatically changed from emphasizing connectedness to aligning connectedness with commerciality and using the terms interchangeably. ()
Norms, as
embodied by individual actors, contribute to a habitual order into which also
collectivities, institutions and market structures are locked. The meanings of
individual actions within this order are changed by their economic value (), the value that those actions carry within a wider
economy of data processing.
There are three
broader consequences for social order of this matrix of connective practices
that are today very common on social media platforms. First, through these
interfaces’ managed continuity, individuals – many of whom would not otherwise
have been in a ‘situation’ of shared action with each other – become so. As
Boltanski and Thévenot () point out, in complex societies there are
countless relations of ‘coexistence’, but ‘in our everyday experience,
coexistence does not always produce a situation’, an encounter for mutual
influence. But the managed continuity of platforms perforce creates new forms of ‘situation’ between people, which, in
turn, create new starting-points for social order. Second,such situations
create collectivities of varying significance, as discussed in
Chapter 9. Sometimes
the significance is real for the users and, in exceptional circumstances, can
be the focus of collective action, although rarely (without other conditions
being met) are these collectivities the focus of solidarity and risk-taking.
Sometimes the significance is minimal for users, but great for the underlying
commercial interests, since they are a precondition of the generation of
economic value. Third, such interfaces create new forms of closer
interdependence with commercial sites of power that once
were uninvolved in everyday social life, except when ‘invited in’ through the
choice of a consumer product. As Ulises Mejias says, ‘new modes of sociabililty
emerge’ under these conditions, but ‘they become organized under a structure
where every aspect of the public is owned, hosted or powered by private
interests’ (). Some go further and see here, in the way that norms
of social performance increasingly ape norms of market performance, an
‘economization of self’ as a bundle of capital that ‘must be productively
invested’ through attracting more followers, likes, retweets and so on (). Whatever one’s view of that, the salience of
commercial power in everyday sociality has been hugely increased, and that has
consequences for the overall type of social order in which we are living.
How do these
shifts in the nature of communicative processes for selves and collectivities
translate to the level of organizations? Typically, an organization is defined
by its orientation to a shared purpose and practices, by a coordinated division
of work or responsibility, and by certain rules of membership.1 If we characterize
organizations this way, they can be seen as distinctive institutions focused on
specific goals, and offering particular roles in terms of membership and
practice. But organizations are not static phenomena: they are rooted in
practices and produced through an ongoing process of ‘organized sensemaking’
(). Organizations are ‘discursive
constructions’ (), constructed through a kind
of ‘metaconversation’ () about their purposes
that evolves through practice.
There are two
sides to this organizational sense-making: an internal side (how actors within
the organization construct a sense of what the organization means), and an
external side (how the organization constructs a sense of the organization in
relation to its external environment). But this division between internal and
external is itself continually constructed as part
of the organization’s practice, building on the various resources that are
available to that organization. In this sense, organizations are a special kind
of figuration – or figuration of figurations – in which individuals are
implicated in formal ways and which, through their ongoing processes
of construction and various processes of legal recognition, acquire as
‘corporate actors’ a certain kind of agency that is very different from the
informal agency of collectivities discussed in Chapter 9 ().
Through this agency, organizations have an ordering power within wider
institutional fields like law and the economy (). There are at least three levels on which organizations and their
ordering power are affected by the changing media environment within a context
of deep mediatization: organizational orientation, organizing processes, and
underlying knowledge production.
Organizational orientation – the overall
meaning of an organization – is transformed through relations with media, not
only within the organization, but through more general discourses. Meyer and
Rowan () long ago introduced the concept of ‘rationalized institutional
myth’: that is, the social construction of myths such as organizational
‘efficiency’, ‘structures’ and ‘missions’, that legitimate organizations as such and orientate their practice. Such myths are
communicated mainly through media. They are what we
called in Chapter 4
‘meaningful arrangements’ of the social world, and have consequences both within and
beyond the organization, ‘co-constitut[ing]
the public’s ideas of organizations’ and organizations’ ideas of themselves and
acting ‘not only [as] descriptions of organizations, but [as] descriptions for organizations’ (). Such myths may be general or specific, but when they become related
to particular organizations, they provide ideas of order. Think of
the well-known myths of ‘success’ for companies, or of ‘efficiency’ for
bureaucracies, or the myth of ‘delivery’ used across both organizations and
government in neoliberal democracies. The crucial point is less that all these organizations always fulfil such
expectations. It is rather that such myths provide legitimacy for
organizations, and act as a normative basis for organizational practice and its
evaluation. Or as Magnus Fredriksson and Josef Pallas put it: ‘the way the
media monitor and scrutinize [. . .] organizations is of great importance in
understanding how the legitimacy and reputation of these organizations are
constructed and how they operate’ (). New
myths such as dataism () can also work across different organizations, just as discourses
about ‘new technologies’ of communication have worked throughout the history of
‘modernization’ (). More broadly, as places
where people spend much of their waking hours, organizations are powerful amplifiers of broader myths about desirable forms of order: in that way, they contribute also to
the construction of a wider social order, oriented to particular myths.
Media are also
involved in the transformation of organizational processes.
There is a wide literature on how digital media have changed the structures of
organizations from top to bottom.2
The claim is made that major organizational change derives from digital media
infrastructures, which make new kinds of ‘network organizations’ possible.
Manuel Castells for example linked the late twentieth-century transformation of
the economy to organizational changes that became possible with the internet and
the rise of ‘network organizations’ (). More
recently, it has also been argued that ‘the global data network exerts
institutional force on all contemporary organizations’ (). Media and data networks have become a critical infrastructure for
most organizations, shaping changes in how they are organized at a micro level
and becoming embedded in the ambitions and goals of those working in
organizations ().
While deep mediatization
plays out differently depending on the organizational and institutional context
(), there remains a general transformative moulding force of
media on organizations. The capabilities of digital media and their
infrastructures enable the figurations on which organizations are based to be
differently ordered in space: they are no longer
necessarily organized around physical proximity (). This does not mean that locality no longer matters, as research on
globalized cities has demonstrated: cities remain culturally dense places, and
therefore important for many organizations, especially corporate ones (). But it became easier for organizations to be distributed
across different locations, while sustaining an intense practice of internal
communication and communicational norms that integrate spatially dispersed
actors. The result is to change the quality and complexity
of how individuals and collectivities relate to organizations. Arguably, ‘the
dispersion of social networking technologies creates greater familiarity with
forming teams and groups’ (). Looking outside the organization,
links to the sorts of collectivities of work discussed in the previous chapter
can enable the traditional form of organization to extend itself more widely
into other social domains. Communicative practices in organizations become
themselves moulded by those organizations’ ensembles of media: for example,
writing emails, sharing documents and conducting video conferences, instead of
sending letters and memos, accelerates and intensifies day-today communication
in the organization, while digital archives can be searched more quickly and in
different ways than printed ones. Through the ways in which individual
practices are moulded, deep mediatization intensifies the acceleration of
communications processes within and between organizations.
In sum, all the
media-based changes discussed in Chapters 5 and 6 regarding space and time also matter for
organizations and their practice. There is a basic dialectic at work here: some
organizational transformations are initiated externally, and indeed whole
institutional fields are being transformed, by a changing media environment,
while others are transformed internally by their uses of their
changing media environment – the organization’s actualization of the media
manifold so as to order its ensemble. It is
from the working out of this dialectic in the context of particular
organizations that wider consequences for social order flow.
Third, there is
the transformation of knowledge production within
organizations, linked to the changing media environment. We already referred to
the internet and data networks as important organizational infrastructures
which encourage the extension of organizational communications in space and in
time. But the more far-reaching point – echoing the arguments made in Chapter 7 – is that datafication, as an automated
process, has become part of most organizations’ knowledge production. The legal
theorist Julie Cohen () notes for example with regard to today’s
standardized data and information infrastructures that they are ‘architectures
of control [. . .] reflect[ing] a fundamental shift in our political economy,
toward a system of governance based on precisely defined, continually updated
authorization of access by and to actors, resources, and devices’. There were
always of course systems operating within organizations that restricted access
to various kinds of information on one basis or another. Our point is that in
organizations that have integrated a data-architecture into their operations,
their data ‘system’ – often stored via an external arrangement ‘in the cloud’
(see next section) – is now those organizations’
operating and long-term memory. Once again, and in parallel to the
transformation of individual and collective life, organizational life becomes
dependent on an external layer of institutionalized
interdependence that affects the wider distribution of power and the nature of
social order.
The work of many
organizations nowadays integrates algorithmic models in which the norms and
ordering processes of these organizations become inscribed. An example
discussed in earlier chapters is organizations within the financial market
whose models of market operation have become at last partly dependent upon
complex computer systems that span the many centres of electronically connected
market activity: ‘the global market itself is these produced-and-analyzed
displays to which traders are attached’ (). Only
through the ‘synthetic situations’ constructed by these systems of ‘scopic
media’ can their organizational purposes be
fulfilled, and only through these situations is ‘the market’ (the
organizational myth around which those organizations are above all focused)
itself constructed. ‘Synthetic agents’ more and more are doing the
organizational work, even if supervised by traders. Other types of organization
are also in the process of moving in this direction: for example, police
authorities and tax agencies are beginning to use accumulated and automated
data analytics to solve cases and even predict future ones
(with the hope of preventing them).3
And even organizations in the institutional field of education such as schools
rely on datafication to calculate the quality of schools and teaching on the
basis of data-driven models of student evaluation (). We are however only at the beginning of these changes in organizational
knowledge through datafication, not the end.
To summarize,
deep mediatization is transforming the ‘inner life’ of organizations, and by
that also changing the terms on which organizations interact with wider power structures,
and their implication therefore in social order. At the core of this lies the
role that media generally, and datafication in particular, play in the very
basis of organizations’ processes of ordering in an age of deep mediatization,
but also in the way organizational purposes are constructed in wider public
discourse. Therefore, if we want to consider the role that organizations have
in wider institutionalized fields and how thereby they contribute to social
order, we have to take seriously their deep implication in processes of
mediation.
We have argued
that the three basic actors in social life – selves, collectivities and
organizations – are being transformed by media and media infrastructures
including data and information infrastructures, and in the course of this are
becoming implicated in social order in a radically new way. What happens when
we extend our argument to consider the seemingly open spaces beyond organizations in which government and various
other types of power seek to intervene and regulate? These are spaces
characterized by multiple actors of varying levels of complexity, so that it is
difficult to evaluate overall consequences or directions of change. But,
provided we choose well our angle of entry, a number of important developments
come into view.
Politics and
government have always been complex, relative to the norms of the social
domains in which they sought to intervene, but the increase in the
complexity of communication challenges faced by those involved in early
twenty-first-century politics and government is not trivial.It is important to
see both positive and negative sides of the changes under way. New forms of
communication linkage make possible, as legal theorist and former US government
adviser Beth Noveck points out, new ways of involving citizens and experts in
effective government: there is, she rightly warns, ‘too little diversity in the
work of managing society’ (), although there is little
evidence so far that the opportunities that digital networks offer to generate
decisive change in how democracies function have been taken. Meanwhile, new
forms of exclusion from the civic and political process are being forged.
To help us
imagine the possible scale of changes in politics and government
now under way, it is worth dwelling on a historical example when a shift in mediatization was
associated with a change in the nature of government. Most accounts of early
modernity focus on the invention from the fifteenth century onwards of printing
in Europe as decisive for the later emergence of
the modern nation-state. But more decisive, some historians argue, and more
far-reaching in its implications for how modern government would come to be
conducted, was the shift to rule through written document
that M.T. Clanchy () dates much earlier, that is, to the eleventh to
thirteenth centuries. The changing modalities of government were a crucial
driver in cultural change: ‘lay literacy grew out of bureaucracy,
rather than from any abstract desire for education or literature’ (). The increasing circulation of written documents for everyday
purposes – from maps to legal records to royal decrees – and the skills
associated with their production and interpretation, transformed how a ruler
could interact with his territory. By the time of England’s King Edward I,
government, in theory at least, ‘had access to every place of habitation,
however small, and every man, however lowly his status’ (), not
through any ease of personal physical access (roads remained very rudimentary),
but through the coordinated power of a network of practices based on written
documents. The state’s leading role in this shift parallels Elias’ account of
the state’s leading role in the ‘structure of civilized behaviour’ and
‘manners’ () in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Europe.
The increasing shift from modes of government based on norms of personal
(face-to-face) command to modes of government based on the deferred force of
written description and instruction had other implications too: the growth of permanently available written records as
reference-points for rule (); the need to find ways of ordering the sudden mass of important records ().4
The broad
parallels with the profound transformation of government and politics through
the explosion of digital records from the 1990s onwards () are
striking. So too is the emergence of extreme inequalities of resource
associated with both historic and contemporary transformations: just as today
the power to build, design and manage digital infrastructures is concentrated
in very few rich institutions (Google, Facebook, Amazon: see Chapter 4), so in the early
medieval period ‘only the king possessed permanently organized writing
facilities’ (). The potential for broader
shifts in the organization of power and order from shifts in the degree of
mediatization were present in the early medieval period, just as they are
today. Those shifts operate within nations and between nations, with terms such
as the ‘digital
underclass’ () having an ambiguous status as a national and transnational phenomenon.
If by contrast we
turn back to nineteenth-century America, we can learn also from James Beniger’s
account of the emergence of modern communications – the telegraph, newspaper,
postal services, telephone – in response to the ‘crisis of control’ created by
the mismatch between the communication ‘demands’ of an expanding social and
economic domain and the ‘supply’ of a rudimentary communications
infrastructure. The transformation in modes of communication that emerged
across all areas of business and government in the second half of the
nineteenth century in expanding capitalist economies was not a matter of
inventing a single medium and embedding it in daily life, but involved shifts
in the interdependence of all aspects of organizational life,
what Beniger calls ‘the progressive layering of control levels’ ().
How much then can
we learn from these earlier precedents for the transformation in social order
now under way through the wave of digitalization? One key difference between
then and now is the new salience, even dominance, of private corporations, a
theme that so far we have approached more generally through our discussion of
the institutionalization of selves, collectivities and the
frameworks in which organizations operate. All the processes we are discussing
here have their basis in the institutionally based infrastructure of connection
we call ‘the internet’. Certainly, the state in various countries was
enormously important in the early investments and planning of the internet as a
connective infrastructure (), a contribution that
in fact goes back deep into the history of the computer and the
nineteenth-century calculative technologies that preceded it (). But today, while the state is a key beneficiary of new forms of digital
rule, it is not the main driver of change. As Louise Amoore argues in her
history of the new data-based systems of surveillance and tracking movements
across borders:
It is not the advent of a war on terror that ushered in a raft of novel and unprecedented security technologies. In fact, quite the reverse is true: the events of 9/11, and the exceptional measures that were so quickly declared actually cleared space for the sovereign enrolment of mundane, ordinary technologies that had been used in the gathering of everyday transactions of bread and sausages for some eight years. ()
Amoore details
the role of executives from IBM and UK food and clothing retailer Marks and
Spencer in developing ‘association rules’ that would predict consumer behaviour better from
the textual traces available to new data mining techniques (). The drive of marketers to track consumers more continuously and
predictively (from which states in turn benefited) was part of the expansion of
opportunities for corporate organizations that derived from the new
digital infrastructure. Other pressures towards data mining, however, derived
from the increasing problem for advertisers that flowed from the explosion of
digital media content in circulation in the late 1990s, which made it
increasingly difficult to claim that any one expensive piece of discrete
advertising reached its audience more effectively than another ().
Building on this, powerful media players, such as Facebook, are ‘reworking the
fabric of the web’ to make it a space better integrated to their economic goals
().
From many
directions then, the organizational implications of digitalization are having
profound consequences for order and rule. Also important, from the point of
view of balances of power, is the shift in control over the computing
infrastructure on which the digital world’s communications infrastructure
relies. Today’s economy depends on vast data-processing capacity that has
become, in most respects, too expensive for individual corporations or national governments to own internally. The rise of
‘the cloud’ – that is, ‘the storage, processing and distribution of data,
applications and services for individuals and organizations’ () – represents a massive shift of control away from the
nation-state, which until a decade ago had broad control of its information
resources (), and towards the small number of dominant
corporations (Apple, Google, Microsoft) which manage the remote computer
servers on which ‘the cloud’ exists. We are not arguing here that the result is
necessarily more order, let alone an order that is better attuned to key
normative values. Although some classic analyses see the growth of information
infrastructure as crucial to how effective social order was achieved in
different phases of history (), there are counter-examples,
for example the ambiguous status of bureaucracy in the large-scale violence of
the twentieth century. We will return to the normative questions in Chapter 11.
Alerted then to
the possibility that the changes in the communications infrastructure
constituted by the waves of digitalization (and datafication) may themselves constitute a significant shift in the nature
of social order, how can we relate this to the stuff of everyday politics and
government?
Apparent changes in the nature of
politics derived from digital media have attracted most attention. There is no
doubt that media platforms for social networking have made short-term political
mobilization easier (see Chapter 9), while
also intensifying the dynamics of political scandal (). But this
is very different from concluding that the nature and balance of politics overall has been changed by these new communication
tools.
There are at
least four strong reasons for caution against rushing to such a conclusion. First,
the aspects of politics that would appear to have been transformed by digital
communications are principally the ‘negative’ ones,
what Pierre Rosanvallon () calls ‘counter-democracy’, leaving the
implications for other aspects of politics, for example, the long-term building
of parties for political transformation, less clear or perhaps even negative
(). Second, the large-scale narratives told of how
politics has changed through digital media tend to be universal stories built on generalizations from a
limited number of cases, most notable the USA and the UK. More careful
comparative analyses of digital politics paint a more mixed picture, with very
different implications in different political systems (). Third, once we begin to grasp the complexity of how the wave of digitalization has
affected organizations, we cannot underestimate the complexity of how it has
affected political organizations such as parties engaged in multi-level
conflicts. The combination of increased production and archiving of politically
relevant information and more distributed access within and beyond
organizational boundaries to that same information probably reduces the stability on average of political institutions
(). Meanwhile, extended networks of communication have enabled
organizations, such as political parties working in elections, to join up
multiple political actors in what Rasmus Kleis Nielsen calls ‘campaign
assemblages’ for the purposes of organizing face-to-face
communication with potential voters (). Not only does this reverse
the prediction of 1990s campaigners that ‘personalized’ communication was
redundant in modern digital campaigning, but it alerts us to the effectiveness,
in the pressured context of elections, of figurations of ‘fundamentally and
never fully integrated mutually dependent actors who then go their separate
ways once the election is over’ (). In such contexts, once again,
the balance between political power and commercial power may be surprising:
‘your local supermarket is very likely to be more organizationally and
technologically sophisticated than your local congressional campaign’, notes
Nielsen ().
A final reason for caution, moving in the
other direction, is that the general proliferation of politically relevant
information (just as with consumer-relevant information) makes it all the more
difficult to predict the consequences of political communication by particular organizations.
Not only is cultural and historical context important,
but so too (and just as culturally variable, potentially) are citizens’ habits
of selection from the vast information universe available
to them to motivate their political choices (). Many fear that
information selection regularly locks people in ‘bubbles’ that are reinforced
by the operations of search engines in presenting information to web searchers
that fits better with the searchers’ past patterns of information use (). Against this background, we need to know more about the figurations of solidarity and expression in which
citizens of particular types at particular locations are, or are not, involved.
An excessive emphasis on networked politics at the expense of more detailed
research on the social figurations in which network interactions actually
matter has so far held back research in this area.5
Rather than
expect as yet to find clear patterns in how, under conditions of deep
mediatization, particular political conflicts work
themselves out, it may be more promising to examine the changing conditions for
general projects of political order, that is, for
government. As we saw already, governments, the embodiment of the nation-state,
are becoming deeply reliant on the private corporate interests that sustain
today’s data infrastructure. That granted, what are the implications of deep
mediatization for rule?
If we think of
governments as very large figurations of figurations, then the implications of
deep mediatization for organizations apply even more strongly to governments:
there are new opportunities for coordination on an extended scale and with increased
precision over time, facilitating government by delegation to a
vast range of authorities. Domains of internal networked communication are
fundamental to the expanding work of government. But government, of course,
does not work in a vacuum. The requirement of government, particularly in
democratic states, to retain a minimal, even high, level of legitimacy before
its citizens necessarily exposes governments to the accelerated communication
flows of the general media environment. Over a decade ago, German political
scientist Thomas Meyer () pessimistically argued that the
foreshortened time-scales of media narratives in the 24/7 digital news
environment accelerated not only the time-scale of government reaction to news
events, but also
the cycle of policy generation, with corrosive impacts on the
quality of policy itself. There are certainly accounts from former senior
governments that would support that view (), and the beginnings of
comparative empirical work that might give some support to these fears
(). But more extensive empirical work is needed.
Meanwhile, far
from the locations where policy is developed, citizens go on with their lives,
but in a changed relationship to what they still imagine as ‘the state’,
mediated by an increasingly vast data infrastructure. Two authoritative
commentators, Engin Isin and Evelyn Ruppert, note that ‘although the internet
may not have changed politics radically in the fifteen years [between 1998 and
2013], it has radically changed the meaning and function of being citizens with the rise of both corporate and
state surveillance’ (). It is not
just a matter of performing a citizen identity in a new range of situations: it
is, more fundamentally, a matter of increasingly integrating the rhythms and
patterns of individual practice into the demands of the new systems of data
collection on which the state increasingly relies. We saw in Chapter 7 the significance for
selves of the rise of deep forms of categorization through data processes, in Chapter 8 for collectivities and
their imaginary of political communities. But what exactly are the implications
for government, and the possibility of social order through governing? We are,
once more, too early in this shift to offer a definitive judgement, but some
directions of change are becoming clear.
The importance of
managing media for government’s stability has been clear for decades
(), and has always
revolved around the management presentation of external realities, such as
crises, scandals and natural disasters. But as the project of government shifts
in part to managing the vast data infrastructure on which its
targeted actions-at-a-distance now depend, government-citizen relations themselves become increasingly mediated by this
infrastructure and its bureaucratic interfaces. As Ruppert puts it:
What people do in relation to government (transactions) becomes more central rather than what they say they do and who they say they are (subjective identifications) [. . .] through all of this doing, subjects are less able to challenge, avoid or mediate their data double. ()
We discussed the
concept of ‘data double’ in Chapter 7
in relation to the self, but we must return to it here since it is fundamental
to understanding the type of governmental ‘order’ that is emerging under
conditions of deep
mediatization. Relations between citizens and governments have never been free
from possibilities of alienation. But when governments’ actions, whatever their democratic intent, become routinely
dependent on processes of automated categorization, a dislocation is threatened
between citizens’ experience and the data trajectory on the basis of which they
are judged. Schutz and Luckmann’s phenomenology grounded the ‘natural attitude
of daily life’ in the individual’s ‘stock of previous experience’ ()
yet there was more than enough grim experience in the mid twentieth century to
show that citizens could not always expect their governments to avoid actions
that clashed violently with their stock of experience. But datafication is
disturbing in a more banal way, because it is a mode of government that is never likely to be responsive to ‘what [citizens] say
they do and who [citizens] say they are’.6
What consequences
can we expect, over the longer term, for the core constituents of order and
legitimate government: trust, legitimacy, the credibility of government action, citizens’ sense of
their own efficacy as political actors? As yet, we do not know.
But two large-scale and disturbing trends need at least to be registered.
First, there is the association of the new datafied social infrastructure with
the entrenchment of social economic and ethnic inequality ().
Second, as already noted, there is the increasing importance of force, rather
than consensus-based norms, in the constitution of social order. Norms in the
area of data collection are, as we have seen, changing: dataism is precisely an
attempt to inculcate new norms of data generation, that naturalize
a certain submission to new relations between corporations and consumers, and
citizens and state, based on continuous surveillance and the citizen’s active
role in the generation of data. Yet the very infrastructure on which our
networked digital communications relies is, in an important sense,
‘authoritarian’ (), based on ‘compliant submission to
authority’, not consent. Norms in the absence of possible meaningful consent
and negotiation become very close to force, with
potentially dangerous long-term implications for wider institutional
legitimacy.
That is our
concern: that, under conditions of deep mediatization, an ever more complex
infrastructure of interdependent communication installs a datafied social order
which relies more on infrastructural force (or
near-force) than on the openly contestable legitimacy of norms. We need in the
next and concluding chapter to consider more fully the normative implications
of such large-scale shifts in the construction of the social world and of
social order.
This book began
with a question, which we rephrase here. What are the consequences of the
social world being mediated, that is, constructed from, and through, media,
that is, technologically mediated processes and infrastructures of
communication? We have sought in this book to address that question in stages.
In Part I we analysed the consequences
for the basic fabric of the social world when it becomes constructed through
mediated communications. In particular, we considered the role of
communications in the history of the past six centuries, and the long-term
process of successive waves of mediatization that have resulted in the current
stage of ‘deep’ mediatization. Deep mediatization involves all social actors in
relations of interdependence that depend, in part, on media-related processes:
through these relations, the role of ‘media’ in the social construction of
reality becomes not just partial, or even pervasive, but ‘deep’: that is,
crucial to the elements and processes out of which the
social world and its everyday reality is formed and sustained. At the same time,
and connectedly, media outlets and platforms become themselves increasingly
interconnected in both production and usage, creating a many-dimensional space
of possibility that we have called the media manifold. A helpful concept for
grasping our relations to and within the media manifold is that of figuration,
developed from the late work of Norbert Elias. Part II was dedicated to exploring the fundamental
dimensions of our social world under these new conditions, and specifically
their increasing interrelatedness with media contents and media
infrastructures. We examined the dimensions of space and time, and the new
dimension of ‘data’, which more and more is involved in the moulding of what
counts as social knowledge. In Part III we addressed agency in the social world: the
construction of the self and of collectivities, and the emergence of wider
social order under conditions of deep mediatization.
The discussion of
order in our last chapter began to raise new questions about how we evaluate overall the consequences for human
life-in-common of
the mediated construction of reality. That is the main focus of this concluding
chapter. Our argument throughout has been designed to move beyond the
limitations of Berger and Luckmann’s classic account of ‘the social
construction of reality’, which failed completely to register the role that
mediated communications play in that construction. But registering media
seriously within a phenomenological approach requires us not only to develop a
fully materialist phenomenology (since ‘media’ are undeniably
a complex material infrastructure), but to recognize the particular new type of
deep infrastructure for constructing the social world that today’s data-driven
platforms and patterns of social connection represent. And that recognition
provides the basis for a second move beyond Berger and Luckmann, which
identifies a level of analysis absent from their argument, a level on which the
pressures towards particular types of social order may come into conflict
within important human goals and needs. This level of evaluative critique, built on phenomenological
premises, and inspired in particular by Elias’ insights into how social order
is built and the pressures it exerts, was not available to Berger and Luckmann,
because their analysis retained a primary focus on face-to-face communications
and forms of institutionalization that ultimately derive from face-to-face
interactions, and ignored the transformative, but tension-laden, role that
mediated communications may come to play in the construction of the social
world.
It is worth
emphasizing that, in what follows, we are not pretending that there are no
variations between cultures and societies in the extent to which deep
mediatization, in all its aspects, has taken hold there. But, since the aim of
this conclusion is to alert readers to the implied direction of change
linked to deep mediatization, we will put less emphasis here on variability and
more on what we see as the key outlines of an emergent trend that is gaining
force in many parts of the world regardless of uneven
access and economic development: a tendency towards a new type of social order distinctive to deep mediatization
and to datafication. Our aim however is not to predict a universal direction of
travel, and, indeed, if resistance to this trend were to halt the tendencies we
identify, we would be delighted. Just as important as identifying strong
tendencies towards order is to be alert to the possibilities of agency, and resistance to order, as we have noted at
various points in Part III.
We are concerned
with the social unfolding of transformations in media
infrastructures, that is, the complex consequences of media technologies’
embedding in everyday social life. We reject entirely a technological
determinist approach, and specifically in the form that argues that new ‘media’
generate a specific ‘logic’ that, in some simple way, is rolled out across the social terrain. That is
not how technologies make a difference, and it is not how social change occurs.
Relatedly, the growth over time of relations of interdependence
cannot be understood except within a model of non-linear causal complexity.1 For that reason, it
is incoherent to think of deep mediatization as involving
the unfolding of just one ‘logic’. Rather, deep
mediatization refers to a meta-process involving, at every level of social
formation, media-related dynamics coming together, conflicting with each other,
and finding different expressions in the various domains of our social world.
At the very least, deep mediatization derives from the interaction of two very
different types of transformation: a changing media environment characterized
by increasing differentiation, connectivity, omnipresence, pace of innovation
and datafication (the emergence of the media manifold); and the increasing
interdependence of social relations (the complex role in social life of
figurations and figurations of figurations, that are based, in part, on a
media-based infrastructure, but whose dynamics evolve beyond it).
To set the scene,
let us first revisit what broad principles we have learned during the course of
this book about deep mediatization. What implications do those principles have
for how we evaluate the mediated construction of reality?
To restate one of
the book’s fundamental claims: the social world is constructed from
interdependencies. Media, as they have expanded through successive stages of
their development, introduce their own interdependencies, which become embedded
in daily life, generating the overall ‘outcome’ we label, for convenience,
‘mediatization’. But when ‘everything is mediated’ (),
mediatization reaches a new point: a phase of deep mediatization,
when the nature and dynamics of interdependencies (and so of the social world) themselves become dependent upon media contents and
media infrastructure, to a significant degree. At this point, mediatization can
justifiably be called ‘deep’.
Deep
mediatization emerged out of a particular historic shift in both media
infrastructures and the embedding of media in social life. The decisive break
occurred with what we called in Chapter 3 the wave of digitalization, and the reason
was the increased degree of interconnectedness between
media that the digitalization of content and the parallel building
of an open-ended space of connection (the internet) made possible. That
interconnectedness between media brought, inevitably, increasing interdependence between the actors
(individual, collective, organizational) that use media for various reasons,
not least to connect and interact with each other. The transformation of media
provided a starting-point for the transformation of social order. Understanding
the consequences of all this for social processes and
the possibilities of social order is the goal of researching deep
mediatization.
Deep
mediatization, as just noted, operates in a nonlinear way. We can no longer
understand the influence of ‘the media’ any more as the influence of a separate
domain (for example, journalism) onto other domains
of the social world. It does not matter which part of the social world we
consider: its formation is in one way or another related to media. The broader
transformations that result are complex, contradictory and likely to create
tensions – between actors and institutions and between different levels of
organization and resource allocation – that are only partly resolvable. It
follows that, if we pay attention to deep mediatization, we become interested
in much more than the presence of media processes in all or most social domains
of daily life (which is now, as philosophers say, ‘trivially true’). We engaged
also with how, through social actors’ evolving uses of the media manifold, the nature and quality of social interdependence is itself
changing: the issue, in other words, of agency.
This emerges, for
example, in those moments when individuals try to withdraw from the various
media interfaces on which the social world now seems to rely. Just as any
attempt to pull back from ‘social acceleration’ into ‘oases of deceleration’
(for example, through various forms of body and mind maintenance) is
paradoxical, because only temporary and provisional (), so too
with mediatization. People who refuse to use certain (digital) media and try to
limit their reachability through media, companies that introduce email-free
holidays, hotels that offer a room switch ‘to block wireless internet signals’
(), and so on, to help people ‘refuel’ and then ‘get back on again’ –
all are looking for what, after Rosa, we might call
‘oases of de-mediatization’ (). Much popular
self-help literature reflects on such attempts to slow down the process of
mediatization, but they are destined to fail: they are almost certainly a prelude
to a return, to a re-absorption into media which in turn acts to confirm the
depth of mediatization ‘after all’.
There are three
fundamental implications of deep mediatization that only become fully clear at
this stage of our argument: deep recursivity, expanded institutionalization,
and intensified reflexivity.
First, under
conditions of deep mediatization, both social and media processes become deeply recursive. ‘Recursivity’ is a term from logic
and computer
science indicating that rules are reapplied to the entity that generated them
(). More broadly, this refers to processes that reproduce themselves
by replaying all or part of the calculative or other rational process that
initially generated them. But in many respects, the social world has always
been recursive, at least insofar as it is based on rules and norms: we keep it
going, and repair it when problems arise, by replaying once again the rules and
norms on which it was previously based.2
In a social world characterized by interdependencies whose practicality depends
on an infrastructure of multiple connected media – the media manifold –
recursivity deepens.
Many forms of
action now involve the use of software, and software itself involves recursivity
(), that is, ‘as symbolic forms coalesce in massively networked
code formations, the agential relations in software become involuted and
recursive’.3 Since software must
function in the wider space of connection, even apparently simple acts by
social actors depend on very many levels of recursion. This deep recursivity
becomes the default feature of a social life that is increasingly dependent on
digital media, their infrastructure and institutional bases, and our time spent
with them. We feel the costs viscerally: when ‘our’ media break down – we lose
internet connection, our password stops working, we are unable to download the
latest version of software required by the device or function we want to use –
it is as if the social infrastructure were itself, in some
respect, breaking down: recursivity has been interrupted, ontological security
becomes threatened. Deep social recursivity is the corollary of deep
mediatization under conditions of ever more interrelated media and data
infrastructures.
Under such
circumstances, what once seemed radical about some versions of media theory
() becomes radically inadequate. While
it remains true that we need to emphasize the ‘materiality of media’ (), this materiality cannot be grasped any more except by
focusing on each medium in relation to other media
and the forms of social interdependence that build
around those media interrelations.
Second, deep
mediatization (at the level of media interrelations and basic social
interrelations) has an implication for wider social order: this is the process
of expanded institutionalization noted in Chapters 8, 9 and 10. Actors (individual, collective, organizational),
and other elements of social life, that could once be considered as discrete,
that is, able to act relatively independently, become in the digital age
dependent for their basic operations
and functioning on a wider media infrastructure that is supplied and controlled
by new types of institutional power (search engines, data aggregators, cloud
computing suppliers, and so on). Under these conditions, the space of social
action is overlain with a skein of connections from which it is almost
impossible to escape, because it entangles actors on every scale. Far from
being accidental, this transformation is highly motivated: it provides
completely new sources of income and profit from the supply of privately owned,
commercially driven infrastructure that enable not just aspects of material
life (like a postal service or car fuel), but the material spaces of social
life itself. This construction of the
social is literally that: a remaking of the
social. The era of deep mediatization brings with it not so much a deepening of
institutionalization (since it is the lateral force of
these entanglements to ever more distant and opaque institutions that strike
us) but its expansion.
Third, deep
mediatization brings with it the intensified reflexivity
of social actors. In this context, it is worth noting the double meaning of
‘reflexivity’. First, if we follow Ulrich Beck (), reflexivity in an
increasingly complex world refers to the increasing number of side-effects of a
social process, side-effects that may work against their originating forces,
undermining various forms of stable tradition and structure in the process. It
remains an open question whether deep mediatization fits within the undermining
of structure. But, for sure, it brings with it many complex and unanticipated
side-effects, including those of deep recursivity and expanding
institutionalization.4
We have already discussed a number of examples for this kind of reflexivity of
deep mediatization. Interestingly, one fundamental characteristic of deep
mediatization seems to be that a typical reaction to the negative side-effects
of mediatization is not to withdraw, but to solve the anticipated problems by
even further introduction of media technologies (), so
reinforcing, not undermining, structure. But there is a second sense of
reflexivity that was put forward by Anthony Giddens () who emphasizes the
practical self-awareness and self-directedness of
social actors (). The making and sustaining of media,
both content and infrastructure, involves the actions of social actors who are
reflexive: whatever pressures it faces – and in Chapter 7 we discussed how much of today’s media infrastructure
operates in ways opaque to social actors – reflexivity in the latter sense
cannot be squeezed out of the social world. But something is changing in the
sites of self-directed reflexivity. As the mutual transformations of media and
social life intensify along multiple dimensions, they increasingly expose
‘edges’ that attract concern and anxiety, and push people towards withdrawal, requiring normative repair
and invention. Self-reflexivity in a world characterized by the ‘mediation of
everything’ () becomes increasingly open to anxiety, causing
what one of us has called a ‘normative turn’ in media debates ().
We pick up some of these anxieties and concerns about the direction of travel
in the age of digitalization later in the chapter.
The normative
shifts in public debates bring practical changes too. Media as technological
means of communication are developed and introduced by some forms of
pre-planning and involve reflection. But in times of deep mediatization self-reflexivity
goes one step further: at the level of everyday media use, people have a
practical awareness of the specificities of different media and select from the
media manifold accordingly. Technologies are developed, put on the market, and
continuously re-developed and modified in complex processes of interaction
between different groups of actors (). Deep
mediatization gets an additional push from this media-related
‘self-monitoring’, which becomes a permanent characteristic also of
‘institutional reflexivity’ (). Datafication, for example, is an aspect of this, offering the chances for
new, quantified forms of ‘reflexivity’ through the ongoing data that
individuals produce, but it is an aspect deeply driven by the needs of media
and data industries themselves, and brings costs quite different from those
previously associated with reflexivity. Once more, we see how complex
‘solutions’ to problems of interdependence bring with them proposals of yet
higher systemic dependence.
How then, as
media and social theorists, do we start to think about the normative
consequences of deep mediatization and its implications for the social world?
We need at this point to abstract here from the messy and detailed picture of
how reality is constructed through media on the ground to expose a hidden, but
disturbing tension, a tension that would, we believe, have also disturbed our
intellectual guide through much of this book, Norbert Elias.
At no point in
the book have we drawn substantively on Elias’ concept of a ‘civilizing
process’: we have drawn instead on the approach to understanding social life –
in terms of material relations of interdependencies – that allowed him to
formulate the idea of a ‘civilizing process’ stimulated by the early modern
state, and we have drawn in particular on the concept in terms of which, more
fully in his later work, he came to understand those interdependencies: figuration. But the wider
hypothesis of a civilizing process, controversial though it has been, remains,
at the broadest level, important for raising normative questions
about the large-scale consequences of how many overlapping interdependencies,
and the costs or deficits to which they give rise, are lived out and sometimes
find ‘solutions’. It is with normative questions that we want to close our
argument.
Is the tendency
of the shift towards the complex media environment and infrastructure and
heightened social, economic and political interdependency that we have called
deep mediatization overall positive – when considered by reference to the
‘quality of life’ () that
it enables – or is it negative?
This is not a
question that we can answer definitively here, since so many of the
many-levelled transformations we have been considering are in their early
stages, and their long-term interaction cannot be predicted. Yet over the past
half decade or so, a number of writers have begun to draw conclusions about the
direction of travel, and we would like to contribute to that debate.
In doing so, we
make good on the normative commitment embedded in the project of materialist
phenomenology, the commitment to developing as rich a hermeneutic reading as
possible of how the everyday world tends to appear to people under particular
material conditions. Elias’ concern too with understanding social change was at
its core a moral one focused on what is stake for human beings in particular
ways of living together. As he wrote towards the end of What is Sociology?:
People often seem deliberately to forget that social developments have to do with changes in human interdependence and with changes in men themselves. But if no consideration is given to what happens to people in the course of social change – changes in figurations composed of people – then any scientific effort might as well be spared. ()
As human beings,
we cannot adapt some imaginary value-free standpoint in relation to ‘what
happens to people’.5
But pretending to go on as if we could, or alternatively building intellectual
‘values’ from refinements of theoretical speculation detached from ‘what
happens to people’, is all too common, and perhaps part of what Axel Honneth
meant when he wrote that ‘moral categories have all but disappeared from the
theoretical vocabulary of sociology’ ().
What has emerged,
throughout all our chapters, is a structural tension within ‘what happens to
people’ under conditions of deep mediatization. We will end by exposing this
tension, even though it cannot, for sure, be resolved at this historical moment. In this final
move in our argument, we show that a focus on mediatization can precisely
foreground the sorts of contradictions that characterize the figurational order
(or, perhaps better, ‘orders’) of social life.
On the one hand,
the emergence of the internet as an infinite space of connection and
information storage has, through its embedding in everyday life, expanded in
countless ways the range and depth of everyday action. What Anthony Giddens
calls ‘the digital revolution’ () has a depth which can be easy to
miss, precisely because it represents a change in the ways in which social life
can be deep, connected, resourceful, reflexive,
retentive.
New figurations
of connection are without doubt, in various contexts around the world, enabling
‘emergent social and cultural systems’ () that reconfigure
people and resources in new ways, and on the basis of new spatial mappings.
Mediatization is a meta-concept (), and in many respects what it
refers to are changes at a ‘meta’ level: changes in what is thinkable, doable
and manageable. How can this expansion of the possibilities for social action
not, at some level, be positive, even if the speed of change has created a
situation where satisfactory conventions to stabilize and resolve the resulting
problems of interdependence have not yet emerged? That indeed is one reading of
today’s normative turn in social thinking about media and communications, data
and information: that we are in the early phase of an epochal shift in the
material basis of social life, which will generate its own solutions,
reconfiguring social and personal life in the process. Rather than be
concerned, we should, some argue (), be
celebrating the dawn of a new era of ethical invention, the start of a new
‘media life’ (perhaps a ‘data life’?). That is however just one view.
On the other
hand, a growing chorus of voices across the public world, and right across the
social sciences, is becoming concerned at the direction of change. Let us gather
some of those voices. Media analyst Mark Andrejevic calls on us ‘to unearth the
experience of the withering of experience itself’ (). Legal
theorist Julie Cohen is concerned at the ‘gap between the rhetoric of liberty’
associated with the new information environment and ‘the reality of diminished
individual control’ over her relations in and with that environment (). Another legal theorist, Paul Ohm, is concerned at the need to find new
human and normative solutions
to the problem that even the attempt to anonymise personal data can almost
always be defeated by algorithmic processes that are resourceful enough (). Social theorist Hartmut Rosa is concerned that ‘the core of
modernization, the acceleration process, has turned against the very project of
modernity that originally motivated, grounded and helped set it in motion’
(); this is for the paradoxical reason that modernity’s accumulated
investment in technologies of communication, and practices of ever more complex
coordination, create side-effects of social acceleration that undermine the
self-determination of the modern individual. But if these critics are correct,
the problems they identify are more than individual problems; they are problems
with the social order that is emerging through deep
mediatization, a problem implicitly also for its normative legitimacy and so
its long-term sustainability.
The tensions that
surface here are not trivial: they have philosophical resonances. Listen to
renowned social psychologist Sherry Turkle () lamenting that, with
progressing digitalization, the vast proliferation of opportunities (and
obligations) to communicate pushes us to turn other people into machines,
that is, ‘even as we treat machines as if they were almost human, we develop
habits that have us treating human beings as almost machines’. Yet the
requirement not to treat others as things was the core of the
leading moral philosophy of the Enlightenment, Kant’s. That injunction echoes
also the fears of philosopher, Axel Honneth. Honneth recently revived the
concept of ‘reification’ to refer to how people treat somebody ‘as a thing’,
that is ‘to take him or her as something that lacks all human properties and
capacities’ (). Honneth interestingly reflects also on the
possibility of ‘self-reification (),
explaining this term in ways that register some of the pressures we have
uncovered at various points in our argument:
the more a subject is exposed to demands for self-portrayal, the more he will tend to experience all of his desires and intensions as arbitrarily manipulable things [. . .] the ways in which users come into contact with each other obliges them to enter their personal characteristics under predetermined and precalibrated rubrics. ()
However
abstractly, we sense something here of the concerns that today’s growing
processes of datafication are inspiring in citizens of all sorts, and not just
philosophers. Such media-based forms of reification are the outcome () of a
progressive materialization of media and their infrastructures: when complex
technological systems of media are built and stabilized, and related practices
of communication become
institutionalized, the mediated construction of reality comes to appear
‘natural’, and, in that way, processes of mediated
construction become reified.
There is a sense
then of tension between emerging infrastructure and inherited norms of social
life. Is this tension merely an unfortunate misunderstanding that will
gradually be ironed out as we become acclimatized to deep mediatization?
Recalling Harold Innis, the great Canadian communications scholar of the mid
twentieth century and Marshall McLuhan’s teacher, reminds us why it is risky to
believe so: ‘improvements in communication’, he wrote, ‘tend to divide mankind’
().
Is the problem
alternatively that the sheer complexity of our mediated interdependency is now
so great that we are struggling to evolve appropriate conventions that could
stabilize our relations and their costs in a normatively and practically
satisfying way? Possibly, and it is too early to know for sure, but remember
the definition of ‘conventions’ in the classic philosophical study of the
subject: ‘conventions are regularities in behaviour, sustained by an interest
in coordination and an expectation that others will do their part’ (). David Lewis explained how human life may, and does, become orderly
on the basis of minimal information, provided actors have
an interest in coordination. But the type of regularity that Honneth in general
– and many critics of datafication more specifically – fear is a regularity
that derives not from social actors’ general ‘interest in coordination’ among
themselves, but from commercial platforms’ interests in engineering the seamless generation of data from
others’ interactions in the service of their own profit.
This then is the
deepest tension: between the necessary openness of social
life, as the space where human life-in-common develops autonomously, and the
motivated (and, in its own domain, perfectly reasonable) enclosure for commercial ends of the spaces where
social life is today being conducted. A problem for any social order that hopes
to carry some measure of legitimacy over the longer term comes when our spaces
and processes of mutual recognition get themselves blurred with the imperatives
of private interests to generate profit from those very same
spaces and processes. The problem is not the profit motive as such, but the
blurring of its motivated constructions of ‘the social’ with the forms of life
that, as beings who value autonomy, we need ourselves and others to lead.
Under today’s
mediated conditions, then, the social construction of reality has become
implicated in a deep tension between convenience and autonomy, between force
and our need for mutual recognition, that we do not yet know how to resolve.
This book’s attempt to develop a materialist phenomenology of our mediated world has, we hope,
helped at least to identify that tension. What collective resources are needed
to address it satisfactorily will be the work of a whole generation to
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·
accelerated
communication
·
acceleration
of social change
·
actor-constellations
o
power-relations
o
space/time
coordination problems
·
actors
o
collective
o
composite
o
corporate
o
political
o
powerful
o
supra-individual
o
see also agency; social actors
·
Adsense
·
affordances,
media
o
see also media affordances
·
agency
o
collectivities
o
degrees
of
o
increased
capacity for
o
non-human
objects
o
self
o
social
order
·
Agger,
B.
·
aggregative
power
·
Alaimo,
C.
·
algorithms
o
algorithmic
branding
o
legitimacy
·
Alibaba
·
alternative
media movements
·
America,
nineteenth-century
·
Amoore,
L.
·
Anderson,
B.
·
Andreesen,
M.
·
Andrejevic,
M.
·
animal
lifeworlds
·
anti-materialism
·
Apple
·
appresentation
·
apps
·
archiving
·
Aristotle
·
ARPANET
·
Arthur,
B.
·
assemblages
o
figurational
approach
o
ontology
of
o
philosophical
trajectory
o
scaling,
problems of
o
social
·
Attwood,
Margaret
·
audiences
o
undesirable
o
unseen
·
audio
communication
·
audiotapes
·
augmented
realities
·
automated
management of social processes
·
axioms
of everyday life
·
Barassi,
V.
·
Baym,
N.
·
Beck,
U.
·
belonging
o
situational
meaning
o
see also collectivities
·
Beniger,
J.
·
Bennett,
W. L.
·
Berger,
P. L.
o
see also The Social Construction
of Reality
·
Berners-Lee,
Tim
·
Berry,
D.
·
big
data-processing
·
Billig,
M.
·
block
printing
·
blogging
·
blogosphere
·
Blumer,
H.
·
Boltanski,
L.
·
book
and newspaper industry
·
Bourdieu,
P.
·
Bowker,
G.
·
boyd,
d.
·
brand
communities
·
brand
volunteering
·
‘branded’
self
·
Brecht,
Bertolt
·
broadsheets
·
Bucher,
T.
·
bullying
·
Burrows,
R.
·
Bush,
Vannevar
·
business
models of media
·
Calhoun,
C.
·
Canal
Accessible, Barcelona
·
Castells,
M.
·
categorization
o
of
human objects
o
interacting
with categories
·
causal
complexity
·
celebrity
culture
·
Chaos
Computer Club
·
children
and young people
o
digital
traces
o
friendships
and peer relations
o
identity
performance
o
media
role in imagined world of the child
o
mediated
space–time of play
o
new
space of action for
o
parental
monitoring
o
participation
in unregulated publics
o
screening
activity
o
selecting
out
o
skills,
enhancement
o
socialization
·
Christensen,
T.
·
Cipriani,
R.
·
The Circle (Eggers)
·
Claude
glass
·
clock
time
·
‘cloud’
·
clubbing,
mobile
·
cognitive
enhancement
·
Cohen,
J.
·
collective
cultures
·
collective
intelligence
·
collectivities
o
brand
collectivities
o
deep
mediatization and
o
defining
o
dynamics
o
imagined
o
institutionalization
of
o
meaningful
belonging
o
for
media change
o
media-based
o
mediatized
o
of
multi-modal communication
o
new
norms of action/reaction
o
political
projects
o
possible
collectivities
o
of
pure co-presence
o
remaking
o
rhetorics
o
spatially
bounded
o
through
numbers
o
without
communitization
o
of
work
·
colonialism
·
common-sense
knowledge
·
communication
o
accelerated
o
as
action and practice
o
communication-at-a-distance
o
communicative
competence
o
communicative
construction of the social world
o
concept
of
o
defining
o
dispersed
and non-synchronous
o
enhancements
o
face-to-face
o
history
of
o
inputs
from past communications
o
instrumentalization
of
o
many-to-one
o
meaning-making
practice
o
mediated
communication
o
one-to-one
o
patterns
of communication
o
pure
communication
o
role
in history
o
social
world as communicative construction
o
spatial
aspects
o
temporal
dynamics
o
translocal
o
transmission
speeds
o
use
of signs
·
communications
revolutions
·
communicative
actions
·
communicative
excess
·
communicative
practices
o
media
institutionalization of
·
communicative
silence
·
complexity
theory
·
computer
·
computer
games
·
connection
·
connectivity
o
age
of connectivity
o
continuous
o
fundamental
human need for
·
consociates
o
consociates–contemporaries
distinction
·
Constantiou,
I.
·
constructed
reality
·
Cook,
D.
·
coupling
constraints
·
Crary,
J.
·
cross-media
·
cultural
materialism
·
cultural
meaning
·
Da
Matta, R.
·
Dant,
T.
·
data
o
aggregation-for-value
o
asymmetrical
production
o
challenge
to social knowledge
o
drivers
of data production
o
raw
data
o
time-sequenced
o
translated
into social practice
·
‘data
double’
·
data
gathering and processing
o
assessment
o
automated
o
classification
o
discriminatory
purpose
o
economy
of
o
identification
o
private
sector control of
o
social
role of
·
data
tracking see tracking and monitoring
processes
·
data-processes
o
categorization
o
delegation
of knowledge generation to
o
disruptive
o
as
forms of social knowledge
o
materialization
·
databases
o
distributed
relational databases
o
knowledge
production
o
power
·
datafication
·
dataism
·
de-mediatization
·
deep
mediatization
o
of
and collectivities
o
concerns
and tensions
o
deep
recursivity
o
drivers
of
o
and
expanded institutionalization
o
intensified
reflexivity of social actors
o
and
the media manifold
o
meta-process
o
nonlinear
operation
o
normative
consequences
o
and
organizations
o
and
politics
o
of
and the self
o
and
social order
o
user
practices
·
Deleuze,
G.
·
demarcation
practices
·
Derrida,
J.
·
diasporas
·
digital
footprints
·
digital
identity
·
digital
revolution
·
digital
traces
o
chains
of signification
o
made
by others
·
digitalization
of communications media
·
dissemination
media
·
distributed
cognition
·
distributed
information systems
·
Dodge,
M.
·
Doyle,
G.
·
Durkheim,
E.
·
education
o
communicative
practices
o
deeply
mediatized space of the school
·
electrification
of communications media
o
interdependencies
o
social
and cultural consequences
·
Elias,
N.
o
see also figurations
·
Ellison,
N.
·
Elwell,
S.
·
Enterprise
Resource Planning
·
‘eraser
bill’
·
Erasmus
·
everyday
reality
o
construction
of
o
foundation
of social world
o
linked
to action
o
mediated
experience
o
new
topologies
o
ordered
reality
o
paramount
reality
o
as
pure experience
·
exclusion,
practices of
·
externalization,
selfies and
·
face-to-face
communication
o
media
as current resource
o
reciprocal
substitutability of perspectives
o
and
socialization
·
Facebook
·
families
o
distributed
families
o
figurations
o
gender
relations
o
institutionalization
process
o
media
ensemble
o
mediatization
of
o
spatial
complexity, coping with
o
see also children and young people
·
fan
collectivities/cultures
·
fields,
theory of
·
figurational
order
o
problems
of
·
figurations
o
actor-constellations
o
agency
o
arrangements
of
o
assemblages,
parallels to
o
basic
features
o
belongings
o
communicative
practices
o
complexity,
levels of
o
feedback
loop
o
figurations
of figurations
o
‘hanging
together’ of
o
media
ensembles
o
networks,
parallels to
o
obligations
and dependencies
o
power-relations
o
relations
between
o
relations
of meaning
o
relevance-frames
o
scaling
o
and
social transformation
o
source
for new and adapted media technologies
o
system-infrastructure
dependence
o
understanding
o
webs
of
·
film
production
o
digitalization
·
flaming
·
flash
mobs
·
Flickr
·
folded
nature of digital communication
·
Foucault,
M.
·
fragmentation
of experience
·
Fredriksson,
M.
·
Fuller,
M.
·
Gabriel,
M.
·
Gadamer,
H.-G.
·
Gage,
J.
·
game-related
collectivities
·
Gandy,
O.
·
Gemeinschaft
·
Gerlitz,
C.
·
Giddens,
A.
·
Gillespie,
T.
·
global
financial markets
·
global
village
·
globalization
o
deepening
of
o
of
the media
o
pre-modern
o
Western-centric
approach
·
Goffey,
A.
·
Google
·
Google
Adwords
·
GPS
·
gramophone
·
Gutenberg,
Johannes
·
Habermas,
J.
·
habitus
·
hacker
movement
·
Hacking,
I.
·
Hagerstrand,
T.
·
Hanson,
J.
·
hashtags,
and political action
·
Hassan,
R.
·
health
domain
o
data-tracking
o
self-quantification
o
telemedicine
o
wearable
devices
·
Heath,
C.
·
Hegelian
tradition
·
Helmond,
A.
·
‘here
and now’
o
transforming
·
hermeneutic
reading of social order
·
hiding
out
·
Hillier,
B.
·
Hindmarsh,
J.
·
homeless
people
·
Honneth,
A.
·
hospitality
industry
·
HTML
(Hypertext Markup Language)
·
HTTP
(Hypertext Transfer Protocol)
·
Humphreys,
K.
·
hypertext
·
idealism,
philosophical trap of
·
identity
o
‘data
double’
o
self-based
·
Illich,
I.
·
imagined
communities
·
indigenous
media
·
individualization
o
networked
·
industrialization
·
inequalities
o
of
internet access
o
of
news production
o
of
power
o
social
o
spatial
·
information
infrastructure
·
information
precarity
·
infrastructures,
transformation of usual relations to
·
Innis,
H.
·
Instagram
·
instantaneity,
culture of
o
see also 24/7 living
·
institutional
facts
o
disappearance
of
o
interplay
between resources and
·
institutional
fields
·
institutional
reflexivity
·
institutionalization
o
of
collectivities
o
of
communicative practices
o
of
knowledge
o
media
involvement in
o
of
the self
o
of
social form
·
institutions
o
communicative
practices
o
construction
of
o
defining
o
power
inequalities
o
see also organizations
·
instrumentalization
of personal communication
·
interconnectedness
between media
·
interdependence
o
between
domains of action
o
between
social actors
o
datafication-based
o
deepening
o
institutionalized
o
of
meaning
o
meaningful
o
in
organizations
o
overriding
necessities of
o
of
social relations
o
of
sociality on system
o
see also assemblages; networks
·
internet
o
connective
space
o
consociates
o
history
of
o
inequalities
of access to
o
and
networking
o
space
for the conduct of social life
·
Internet
of Things
·
interpretive
communities
·
interrelatedness
o
between
media
o
temporal
o
see also interdependence
·
introspection,
devaluation of
·
Isin,
E.
·
issue
publics
·
iTime
·
Jiepang
·
Kallinikos,
J.
·
Kant,
Immanuel
·
Kavada,
A.
·
Kelly,
K.
·
Kitchin,
R.
·
Kitzmann,
A.
·
Knoblauch,
H.
·
Knorr-Cetina,
K.
·
knowledge
o
automated
generation and application
o
common-sense
o
data
challenge to
o
hermeneutic
approach to
o
hierarchy
of
o
institutionalization
of
o
new
methods of knowledge production
o
organizational
knowledge production
o
social
order of
o
sociology
of
·
Kulturbedeutung
·
Latour,
B.
·
Lee,
H.
·
Lefebvre,
H.
·
Lemos,
A.
·
Lewis,
D.
·
lifeworld
see social world
·
‘like
economy’
·
literacy,
mediated
·
Livingstone,
S.
·
locative
media
·
loss
of community
·
Luckmann,
T.
o
see also The Social Construction
of Reality
·
Luhmann,
N.
·
Lupton,
D.
·
McDowell,
J.
·
MacKenzie,
A.
·
McLuhan,
M.
·
makers
movement
·
manipulable
interfaces with the world
·
manuscript
culture
·
many-to-one
communication
·
marginalized
groups
·
marketization
of online space
·
mass
media
·
materialist
phenomenology
o
as
deep hermeneutics
·
materiality
of media
o
naturalization
·
Mattelart,
A.
·
Mauss,
M.
·
meaning-making
o
communication
as
o
writing
as site of
·
mechanization
of communications media
·
media
o
affordances
o
business
models, shift in
o
content
dimension
o
cultural
context
o
dissemination
media
o
infrastructure
connectedness
o
mass
media
o
materialization
of
o
media
history
o
non-neutral
in communication
o
object
dimension
o
primary
o
symbolic
o
technologically
based
o
translocal
communication
o
waves
of technological innovation
·
media
ensembles
o
changing
·
media
environment
o
changing
o
composite
environment
o
convergence
o
counter-spaces
and alternative collectivities
o
interdependence
relations
o
mechanization,
impact of
o
persistence
and revival of older media forms
o
qualitative
shift
o
young
people
o
see also media manifold
·
media
logic
·
media
manifold
o
individualized
patterns of access and use
o
socialization
and
o
two-level
aspect of
·
media
organizations
o
development
of
o
public
subsidies
·
media
repertoires
·
media
saturation
·
MediaSpace
·
mediated
public sphere
·
mediation
o
defining
o
mediation–mediatization
distinguished
·
mediatization
o
deepening
of
o
defining
o
dialectical
concept
o
Euro-centric
framing
o
history
of
o
mediation–mediatization
distinguished
o
meta-process
o
qualitative
dimension
o
quantitative
dimension
o
of
the social world
o
transcultural
perspective
o
waves
of
·
Mejias,
U.
·
memory
capacities
·
metadata
·
metaspace
·
methodological
nationalism
·
metricization
of social space
·
Meyer,
T.
·
migrant
groups
·
mindedness
·
Mitwelt
·
Mixi
·
mobile
phones
o
smartphones
o
social
media use
·
modernity
o
early
o
European
o
global
o
late
o
social
acceleration
o
space–communication
entanglement
o
speed
of change in
o
time
and
·
monitoring
see tracking and monitoring processes
·
Morozov,
E.
·
MOSAIC
·
multi-tasking
·
narrative
o
historicity
of
o
time
and
·
national
societies
·
nationalism
·
nationhood,
sustaining
·
neo-Aristotelianism
·
neoliberalist
attacks on the ‘social’
·
Netscape
·
network
access, effective
·
network
analysis
·
network
organizations
·
network
society
·
networked
collectivism
·
networked
individualism
·
networked
publics
·
networks
o
actor
constellations
o
analysis
o
figurational
approach
o
multi-modal
uniplex networks
o
production
of meaning
o
structural
metaphor
o
unimodal
multiplex networks
·
new
social movements
o
collective
action
o
connective
action
·
news
o
inequalities
of news production
o
temporality
of
o
see also book and newspaper industry
·
Neyland,
D.
·
Nicolini,
D.
·
Nielsen,
R.K.
·
Nietzsche,
Friedrich
·
Nigeria
·
Nissenbaum,
H.
·
Noveck,
B.
·
NSFNET
·
numeric
inclusion, collectivities and
·
objectivation
·
Occupy
movement
·
Offe,
C.
·
Ohm,
P.
·
one-to-one
communication
·
online
space, marketization of
·
open
source movement
·
OpenStreetMaps
·
oral
cultures
·
organizations
o
algorithmic
models
o
deep
mediatization and
o
defining
o
figurations
o
media
ensembles
o
network
organizations
o
organizational
orientation
o
organizational
sensemaking
o
power-relations
o
rationalized
institutional myths
o
transformation
of knowledge production
o
transformation
of organizational processes
·
packet
switching
·
Pallas,
J.
·
Papacharissi,
Z.
·
parenthood
o
mediatization
of
o
see also families
·
parochialization
·
Parsons,
T.
·
performative
rituals
·
personal
publics
·
phenomenology
o
‘classic’
tradition of social phenomenology
o
humanist
dimension
o
phenomenological
contradictions of the digital age
o
see also materialist phenomenology
·
phonograph
·
photography
o
selfies
·
pioneer
communities, media-related
·
political
actors
·
politics
and government
o
accelerated
communication flows
o
automated
categorization processes, dependence on
o
corporate
control of data-processing
o
deep
mediatization and
o
dynamics
of legitimacy and information
o
early
modern period
o
figurations
o
mediatization
o
new
type of politics
o
organizational
implications of digitalization
o
political
process, extension of
·
politics
of participation
·
polymedia
·
Porter,
T.
·
power
o
aggregative
o
databases
o
inequalities
o
institutions
o
power-relations
o
spatial
o
symbolic
o
temporal
·
practical
consciousness
·
practice
theory
·
print
journalism
·
print
media
·
printing
press
·
‘produser’
of media
·
profit
imperatives
·
public
authorities
·
public
sphere
o
alternative
public spheres
o
mediated
o
transnational
·
publics
·
push
theory of media effects
·
quantified
self-movement
·
Qvortrup,
L.
·
radio
·
radio
telephony
·
readiness,
constant state of see 24/7 living
·
reading
clubs
·
reality
media
·
reciprocity
o
problems
of
·
recursivity
·
reflexivity
o
institutional
o
self
o
social
actors
·
reification
·
relations
of meaning
·
religious
concepts of time
·
religious
forms of communication
·
religious
organizations
·
remediation
·
resources
·
revelatory
role of location
·
Ricoeur,
P.
·
robotics
·
Rosa,
H.
·
royal
sovereignty
·
Ruppert,
E.
·
Sahay,
S.
·
Sarker,
S.
·
Sassen,
S.
·
Savage,
M.
·
Sawyer,
S.
·
scaling
·
Scannell,
P.
·
Schatzki,
T.
·
Schivelsbusch,
W.
·
Schlesinger,
P.
·
Schutz,
A.
·
scopic
media
·
Scotson,
J.
·
Scott,
J.
·
screening
activity
·
scribal
cultures
·
search
engines
o
searcher-sensitive
features
o
see also algorithms
·
Searle,
J.
·
Segerberg,
A.
·
selecting
out
·
self
o
blogself
o
‘branded’
self
o
changing
resources of
o
and
deep mediatization of
o
digital
traces
o
embodied
consciousness
o
institutionalized
selves
o
online
management
o
processual
nature
o
reflexivity
o
repositioning
in space and time
o
self-maintenance
o
self-narration
o
self-projection
and self-promotion
o
social
construction of
o
socialization
o
temporal
project
·
self-awareness
·
self-driving
cars
·
self-externalization
·
self-monitoring
·
self-narratives,
spatiotemporal reach of
·
self-quantification
·
self-sufficiency
·
selfies
·
Seneca
·
Sewell,
W.
·
sharing,
imperative of
·
signs,
use of
·
Simmel,
G.
·
simultaneity
·
smart
mobs
·
smartphones
·
‘social’
o
inherent
complexity
o
mediated
nature of
o
paradoxical
nature of
o
representations
of
o
as
second nature
o
space
where order is at stake
·
social
actors
o
intensified
reflexivity
o
interdependencies
between
o
see also agency; collectivities; families;
organizations; self
·
social
analytics
·
The Social Construction of Reality (Berger and Luckmann)
o
reinterpretation
of
·
social
construction of the self
·
social
constructionism
·
social
constructivism
·
social
facts
·
social
inequalities
·
social
knowledge see knowledge
·
social
media platforms
o
constructed
spaces
o
data,
role of
o
embedded
in daily life
o
own
sense of time
o
timelines
·
social
media time
·
social
molecularization
·
social
morphology
·
social
movements
·
social
order
o
deep
mediatization and
o
force
o
functionalist
notion
o
hernemenutic
reading
o
institutionalized
selves and collectivities
o
norms
o
overlapping
and contradictory orders
o
time
and
o
value
·
social
phenomenology
·
social
reality
o
construction
of
o
displacement
of
o
general
representation of
·
social
robots
·
social
space see space
·
social
world
o
bounded
social worlds
o
construction
of
o
defining
o
differentiated
into domains of meaning
o
everyday
reality and
o
fundamentally
interwoven with media
o
intersubjectivity
o
manifold
o
materialist
phenomenological account
o
media’s
embedding in
o
mediatedness
o
paradox
of
o
relations
of interdependence and constraint
o
small
‘worlds’
o
space
of interrelatedness
o
spatiality
of see space
o
sub-worlds
o
temporality
of
o
theorizing
·
socialization
o
children
o
cognitive
dimension
o
face-to-face
communication
o
fear
and
o
functionalist
model
o
media
manifold and
o
mediatization
of
o
primary
o
ruptures
in
o
secondary
·
society
o
changing
notions of
o
figurational
order of
o
modern
idea of
o
network
society
·
socio-materiality
·
socio-technical
co-production
·
Socioclean
·
sociology,
Weberian definition
·
sociology
of knowledge
·
software
o
discriminatory
control
o
embedding
in everyday life
o
recursivity
o
and
social space
·
space
o
appropriations
of
o
coded
o
communicative
practices
o
complexity
of spatial relations
o
displacement
processes
o
distributive
inequalities in spatial resources
o
geographical
perspective
o
new
types of
o
social
aspects of
o
software
and
o
spatial
organization
o
transformations
of
·
space–time
continuum
o
disruption
of
o
mediated
o
profit
potential
·
spatial
inequality
·
spatial
power
·
stadium
spectatorship
·
Star,
S.
·
structuration
theory
·
superfluity
of information
·
surveillance
see tracking and monitoring processes
·
symbolic
interactionism
o
social
world perspective
·
symbolic
media
·
symbolic
universes
·
systematicity
·
systems
theory
·
tablets
·
Tarde,
G.
·
TCP/IP
protocol, development of
·
technical
interrelatedness of media
·
technological
determinism
·
technology
clusters
·
telegraphy
·
telemedicine
·
telephone
o
digitalization
o
see also mobile phones
·
television
o
digitalization
·
tempo
·
Thatcher,
Margaret
·
third
nature
·
Thompson,
John B.
·
time
o
clock
time
o
dimension
of communicative action
o
individual
experience of
o
iTime
o
and
narrative
o
rearrangement
and derangement of
o
religious
concepts of
o
selective
practices
o
shaping
of modernity
o
simultaneity-across-space
o
social
basis of time-differentiation
o
social
media time
o
and
social order
o
system
imperatives
o
tempo
o
temporal
dynamics of communication
o
temporality
of social situations
o
temporality
of the social world
o
‘thick’
and ‘thin’ time
o
time
deficits
o
time-deepening
o
time-organization
o
time-pressure
o
time-related
obligations
o
time–space
packing
o
transformations
in
o
work
environments
·
time-sequenced
data
·
time–space
measurement
·
tool
reversibility
·
topology
·
tracking
and monitoring processes
o
ideology
of dataism
o
mutual
monitoring
o
self-monitoring
o
self-tracking
o
state
and corporate monitoring
·
transculturation
·
translocal
communication
o
speeding
up of
·
transmediality
·
transnational
connectivity
·
TripAdvisor
·
Turkle,
S.
·
twelfth
century communicative lifeworld
·
24/7
living
·
Twitter
·
Umwelt
·
urban
elites, development of
·
urban
swarms
·
URL
(Universal Resource Locator)
·
van
Dijck, J.
·
viral
communications
·
Virilio,
P.
·
virtualized
media communication
·
von
Uexküll, J.
·
waves
of mediatization
o
of
datafication
o
defining
o
of
digitalization
o
of
electrification
o
interrelatedness
between media
o
of
mechanization
·
web
browsers
·
Weber,
M.
·
Wellman,
B.
·
white
noise
·
Wi-Fi
·
Williams,
R.
·
Williamson,
B.
·
Winocur,
R.
·
Wolf,
G.
·
women,
and technologies of communication
·
work,
workplaces
o
collectivities
o
communicative
practices
o
communicative
silence
o
mediated
o
monochronic
o
political
o
polychronic
o
reciprocity,
problems of
o
time
management
o
time-relations
paradoxes
·
World
Wide Web
·
Wrong,
D.
·
Yahoo
·
Zhao,
S.
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